Versant Argos

Versant Argos is an end-to-end Smalltalk ADE that supports the entire software development life cycle.

History
Versant Object Technology released the first version of the development system in 1993.

It was sold as an integrated system that included a licensed version of the VisualWorks. But it was also sold as an add-on for the latter system in some instances, or at the least available at a discount for those that already owned the VisualWorks package.

The system was seen and sold as much as a RAD system for the Versant ODBMS system that gave you a write once deploy anywhere capability and offered a graphical object modelling functionality and other Requirements Specification and Analysis (RSA) features with the system automatically converting models to Smalltalk code, with some interesting iterative development features as well. While the system could be used without the Versant ODBMS database as it did support connection to SQL databases as an alternative, using the ODBMS allowed the system to use it as a persistent object store and gave you capabilities such as a versioning system and other configuration management capabilities that were lost with the use of a third party RDBMS.

In addition to OS/2 the product was available for Microsoft Windows and the most popular UNIX systems of the day, with a version for the Apple Macintosh showing up a little later.

Versions

 * Versant Argos 1.0 (Jun 1993)
 * Versant Argos 1.4.2 (Jul 1995)
 * Versant Argos 1.5 (Oct 1995)

Licence
Discontinued commercial software, developer licences started at USD 3000 per seat.