Are we already working on legacy designs?

 I've been reading about Apple's SproutCore Cocoa for the Web technology and it got me to wondering about the tools we currently use for back-office web applications development.

 Now to set the record straight right up front, I admire OS X and I have a lot of respect for the Cocoa technology that Apple has been using since OS X (and NeXT Step) was first released.  It's roots are Objective-C, and that's a close cousin to Smalltalk.  Enough for me to pay attention to what's happening.

And of course I'm a long time enthusiast about Smalltalk and it's continued relevancy in our development world today.  I'm willing to believe that 2008 is looking like a pretty good year for Smalltalk development.  The proverbial reference to Seaside is noted.  It looks like VisualWorks, Gemstone and Squeak are all becoming more visible "out there".

There's an interesting side note to the discussion about SproutCore and Cocoa.  It appears that Apple is discouraging Java for development over Objective-C.  Hear, hear.  At least that's my interpretation.

Before I get too far into opinion here, please take a few minutes (well, actually more than just a few will be required) to read these 2 articles about what Apple is doing with Javascript and Cocoa for web applications and the iPhone.

From RoughtlyDrafted: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/06/14/cocoa-for-windows-flash-killer-sproutcore/

From AppleInsider: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/06/16/apples_open_secret_sproutcore_is_cocoa_for_the_web.html

Here's where my thoughts went after reading this.  Many of us are working on server-side applications written with Smalltalk to generate HTML web pages.  Are we working on what will be legacy code and obsolete by eventual use of these new development strategies?