GemStone Systems was founded on March 1, 1982, as Servio Logic, to build a database machine based on a set theory model. Ian Huang instigated the founding, as the technology adviser to the CEO of Sampoerna Holdings, by recruiting the following team, consisting of:
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 in 1986. The engineering group resides in Beaverton, Oregon. Three of the original cofounding engineers, Bob Bretl, Allen Otis, and Monty Williams, have been with the firm since its start. GemStone's owners pioneered implementing distributed computing in business systems. Many information system features now associated with Java EE were implemented earlier in GemStone. GemStone and VisualWave were an early web application server platform. GemStone played an important sponsorship role in the Smalltalk Industry Council at the time when IBM 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 Platform. After a major transition, GemStone for Smalltalk continued as GemStone/S and various C++ and Java products for scalable, multitier architecture distributed computing 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, event stream processing, 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.. Gemfire remained with Pivotal's Big Data division. The product is available standalone but is also integrated into its Cloud Foundry PaaS as Pivotal Cloud Cache.
Product
GemStone builds on the programming language Smalltalk. GemStone systems serve as mission-critical applications. GemStone frameworks still see some interest for web services and service-oriented architectures. 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 for e-commerce web pages or in web application frameworks such as the Seaside web framework. Systems based on object databases 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, and Java environments.
