Using AppeX with Cincom Smalltalk to Meet the Demand for Whisky

Meeting the Demand for Whisky with Cincom Smalltalk

Dram 242, a family-run whisky shop located in Moorsel, Belgium, has seen the demand for whisky increase across Europe, providing a 5% growth in its local whisky market there in Belgium. When it comes to software, there are many things a whisky shop owner needs to manage the business. Things such as the ability to handle essential business applications like maintaining parameters, tracking inventory and handling sales and invoicing, among other things. Dirk Verleysen, the whisky shop owner, always wanted his managing software to be web-based, so he started using Cincom Smalltalk for his business logic.

He selected Cincom Smalltalk for his business application needs because of the speed of development. Cincom Smalltalk adds value and simplicity to developers like Dirk who are looking for application development tools for the web and other platforms. Dependability is key for businesses, and Dirk felt that the reliability of Cincom Smalltalk is very important in his market because when applications crash, it is very annoying to customers.

When asked if Cincom Smalltalk was easy to implement for his business, Dirk replied,

“Yes … we are small, but deploying an app is pretty easy with Smalltalk. In the 90s, you needed small images because they had to be distributed, and that was done on floppy disks. This is no longer a problem, so there is no need to make the image real small.”

When AppeX and SiouX became available in Cincom Smalltalk, Dirk started to experiment with it, and it is his current setup for managing tools and the public website, dram242.be. As described above, AppeX is a very lightweight and flexible modern web application framework, and SiouX is a general-purpose web server that uses both HTTP and HTTPS protocols while squeezing as much scalability and performance out of it as possible.

Like so many other successful users, Dirk talked about how using Cincom Smalltalk eased some of the burdens in his application development. He also claims that web development is very important for growing his Cincom Smalltalk usage for Dram 242:

“The stability has been great! Developing applications for the web is very stable using SiouX and AppeX in Cincom VisualWorks. I love what AppeX and SiouX provide with integration in existing frameworks like Bootstrap and Angular.”

• To learn more about why Dram 242 chose Cincom Smalltalk to help grow its business, click here.