Smalltalk Modernization Solution

For the Smalltalk programming language family

With a business and technology built on Smalltalk, Synchrony’s trusted experts have spent almost two decades addressing the challenges unique to modernizing and migrating Smalltalk.

Synchrony fast tracks the modernization of business-critical Smalltalk applications to meet current business demands while retaining the elegance and functionality of their original design. Our solution is designed to cause minimal disruption, requiring no code freezes, code rewrites, or halts in development.

Our solution is available for all of the Smalltalk programming language family including Dolphin, MT, Object Studio/Enfin, Pharo, Squeak, VisualAge/VA, Visual Works, and Visual Smalltalk Enterprise (VSE).

Agile & Iterative — Modernize Smalltalk via microservices extraction capabilities and using DevOps principles.
Preserve IT Investment — New code is 100% functionally equivalent to the original Smalltalk application.
Reduce Technical Debt & Total Cost of Ownership — Deprecate functionality that no longer matters, and therefore, should not be modernized.
No Code Freezes — Continuous development of the Smalltalk legacy application while modernization is taking place.

Six Smalltalk Applications Modernized to Java for ParcIT Saving Seven Years

parcIT achieved a two-decade-long mission to migrate its entire Smalltalk software application portfolio consisting:

6 applications
2M+ lines of code
209K+ methods
8.4K+ classes

Smalltalk

Modernization Technology Features

Only Synchrony Systems has the ability to modernize Smalltalk in an automated, consistent way. We’ve taken some of the toughest challenges, such as the dynamic nature of Smalltalk, and developed proven technologies to static-type Smalltalk, see the Smalltalk interactions, and extract distinct functionality to transform to microservices.

Static Type Inferencing Engine

The only commercial interactive, static type inferencing and type propagation solution available on the market today. Using static type analysis and proprietary type inferencing algorithm, this technology produces a “strongly-typed” Smalltalk source code that includes generic / parameterized types and interfaces. Absence of this technology is a non-starter for migrating Smalltalk applications to any target statically typed language as it would cause massive code expansion and highly unreadable and unmaintainable code.

Interactive Diagnostics

Interact with context sensitive, configurable, extensive and self-resolving diagnostics as you transform your application. Just as compilers generate compiler errors, the interactive diagnostic service generates comprehensive diagnostics relative to the target language your Smalltalk application is being transformed to. Diagnostics include any static type inconsistencies, naming, missing mapping of types or API’s to target language, code quality, dead code, just to name a few.

Source-Code Transformation

Reduce Total Cost of Ownership by managing external knowledge-base (“KB”) rules that control resultant code quality by executing the KB rules with an automated transformation service. This technology is a full-blown OO programming language that operates on abstract syntax trees (“AST”). Source code transformation not only transforms artifacts types and their interfaces to target programming language; is it also used extensively for code cleanup, code formatting and a much more advanced capability, which is code decoupling to separate monolithic architecture into distributed, microservices architecture.

Architecture Analysis & Drill-Down

Define logical and functional source code components to improve knowledge mining and application understanding. This technology is used on more advanced modernization projects to describe and define a complete target application architecture in terms of 4 different dimensions: 1) application layers 2) subsystems 3) cross-cutting functions and 4) runnable components. This is not just a simple data model. Its a live semantic model that describes the application architecture in terms of real code artifacts that subsequently enables drill-down for deeper application understanding and transformation.

Smalltalk Modernization Options

Using our technology, we can approach the modernization in the way best suited for your future-state and business needs:

“As-Is” Transformation — fat-client, no retraining
Web Transformation — GUIs in the browsers, distributed, no retraining
Mobile Transformation — modern orchestration of UI, cloud & microservices ready

Adapted for

Target Development Environments

VISUALAGE COMPOSITION EDITOR

Visual parts
Non-visual Parts
Connections (visual “visual spaghetti”)

ECLIPSE IDE / VISUAL EDITOR

Widget palette with rich UI widgets
Support for constraint-based widget layout
Dependencies expressed in code (no “visual spaghetti”)

Architecture Transformation

Web Client Tier — thin-client (JavaScript); interactive, rich UI; REST API Calls
Service Middle Tier — web application server; REST/web services; Java/C#/Node.js application logic
Host Tier — continue with high performance, reliability, & security

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Smalltalk Modernization and Migration

Smalltalk Modernization Solution

For the Smalltalk programming language family

Six Smalltalk Applications Modernized to Java for ParcIT Saving Seven Years