GemStone/S is computer

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

, an

application framework In computer programming, an application framework consists of a software framework used by software developers to implement the standard structure of application software. Application frameworks became popular with the rise of graphical user inte ...

that was first available for the programming language

Smalltalk Smalltalk is a purely object oriented programming language (OOP) that was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, but later found use in business. It was created at Xerox PARC by Learni ...

as an

object database An object database or object-oriented database is a database management system in which information is represented in the form of objects as used in object-oriented programming. Object databases are different from relational databases which are ...

. It is proprietary

commercial software Commercial software, or, seldom, payware, is a computer software that is produced for sale or that serves commercial purposes. Commercial software can be proprietary software or free and open-source software. Background and challenge While ...

Company history

GemStone Systems was founded on March 1, 1982, as Servio Logic, to build a

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...

machine based on a

set theory Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies Set (mathematics), sets, which can be informally described as collections of objects. Although objects of any kind can be collected into a set, set theory – as a branch of mathema ...

model. Ian Huang instigated the founding, as the technology adviser to the CEO of Sampoerna Holdings ( Putera Sampoerna), by recruiting the following team, consisting of: * Frank Bouton - President, who was the cofounder of Floating Point Systems Inc * Dr. Michael Mulder - Vice President of Engineering, who was the Group Manager for Advanced Processor Design at Sperry

Univac UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company and ...

and Principal Architect for the Univac 1180 mainframe * Steve Ivy - Vice President of Operation, who was a senior manager at Tektronix * Leonard Yuen - Vice President, Business Development, who was the Development Manager for the IBM DB2 database * Dr. George Copeland - Chief Architect, who was the Senior Staff Engineer at the Advanced Development Group in

Tektronix Tektronix, Inc., historically widely known as Tek, is an American company best known for manufacturing test and measurement devices such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. Originally an independent c ...

* Steve Redfield - Chief Engineer, who was the Chief Engineer for the

Intel 80286 The Intel 80286 (also marketed as the iAPX 286 and often called Intel 286) is a 16-bit microprocessor that was introduced on February 1, 1982. It was the first 8086-based CPU with separate, non- multiplexed address and data buses and also the f ...

microprocessor * Alan Purdy - who was a Staff Engineer at Tektronix * Bob Bretl - who was a software engineering manager at Tektronix Signal Processing Systems * Allen Otis - who was also with Tektronix * John Telford - who was a software engineering manager from Electro Scientific Industries * Monty Williams Servio Logic was renamed GemStone Systems, Inc. in June 1995. The firm developed its first hardware prototype in 1982, and shipped its first software product (GemStone 1.0) in 1986. The engineering group resides in

Beaverton, Oregon Beaverton is a city in the Tualatin Valley, located in Washington County in the U.S. state of Oregon, with a small portion bordering Portland. The city is among the main cities that make up the Portland metropolitan area. Its population was ...

. Three of the original cofounding engineers, Bob Bretl, Allen Otis, and Monty Williams (now retired), have been with the firm since its start. GemStone's owners pioneered implementing

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

in business systems. Many information system features now associated with

Java EE Jakarta EE, formerly Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), is a set of specifications, extending Java SE with specifications for enterprise features such as distributed computing and web serv ...

were implemented earlier in GemStone. GemStone and VisualWave were an early

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

server platform. (VisualWave and VisualWorks are now owned by Cincom.) GemStone played an important sponsorship role in the Smalltalk Industry Council at the time when

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

was backing VisualAge Smalltalk. As of 2005, Instantiations acquired the world-wide rights to the IBM VisualAge Smalltalk product and has rebranded it as the VAST (VA Smalltalk) Platform. After a major transition, GemStone for Smalltalk continued as ''GemStone/S'' and various C++ and

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

products for scalable,

multitier architecture In software engineering, multitier architecture (often referred to as ''n''-tier architecture) is a client–server architecture in which presentation, application processing and data management functions are physically separated. The most wide ...

systems evolved into the ''GemStone/J'' product. This in turn gave rise to ''GemFire'', an early example of a Data Fabric for complex event processing (CEP), event stream processing (ESP), data virtualization, and distributed caching. On May 6, 2010, SpringSource, a division of VMware, announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire GemStone. On May 2, 2013, GemTalk Systems acquired the GemStone/S platform from

Pivotal Software Pivotal Software, Inc. was an American Multinational corporation, multinational software and Service (economics), services company based in San Francisco that provided Cloud computing, cloud platform hosting and consulting services. Since Novemb ...

(the EMC and VMware spin-off). Gemfire remained with Pivotal's

Big Data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

division. The product is available standalone but is also integrated into its Cloud Foundry

PaaS Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a cloud computing service model where users provision, instantiate, run and manage a modular bundle of a computing platform and applications, w ...

as ''Pivotal Cloud Cache''.

Product

GemStone builds on the programming language

. GemStone systems serve as mission-critical applications.Slovenian national gas operator has its billing system running on Smalltalk for 10 years
/ref> GemStone frameworks still see some interest for

web service A web service (WS) is either: * a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or * a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...

s and

service-oriented architecture In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that focuses on discrete services instead of a monolithic design. SOA is a good choice for system integration. By consequence, it is also applied in the field ...

s. GemStone is an advanced Smalltalk platform for developing, deploying, and managing scalable, high-performance, multi-tier applications based on business objects. A recent revival of interest in Smalltalk has occurred as a result of its use to generate

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

for e-commerce

web page A web page (or webpage) is a World Wide Web, Web document that is accessed in a web browser. A website typically consists of many web pages hyperlink, linked together under a common domain name. The term "web page" is therefore a metaphor of pap ...

s or in

web application framework A web framework (WF) or web application framework (WAF) is a software framework that is designed to support the development of web applications including web services, web resources, and web APIs. Web frameworks provide a standard way to build and ...

s such as the Seaside web framework. Systems based on

s are not as common as those based on ORM or object-relational mapping frameworks such as TopLink or Hibernate. In the application framework market, JBoss and BEA Weblogic are somewhat analogous to GemStone. GemTalk Systems, the creator of GemStone, also has a series of products under the GemBuilder moniker, which provide an interface between Smalltalk or Java clients and GemStone databases. Versions of this product exist for VisualWorks Smalltalk, VA Smalltalk (VAST Platform), and

environments.

References

External links

*
IBM

GemStone FAQ (v.1.0)
{{Smalltalk programming language Object-oriented database management systems Proprietary database management systems Distributed computing architecture Software architecture Smalltalk programming language family Companies based in Beaverton, Oregon

Company history

Product

See also

References

External links