seaside November 2003

seaside@lists.squeakfoundation.org

35 participants
25 discussions

[Goodie] Janus
by Cees de Groot 26 Dec '03

26 Dec '03

Janus, the two-headed god, makes his entry in Seasideland! http://tai42.xs4all.nl/~cg/mc has the initial MC file for 'Tric-Janus', which is a small package that makes Seaside apps spider-friendly in the following way: It can be used instead of WAKom (so 'JanusKom startOn: 1234'), and inspects every request: - a request for /robots.txt is intercepted (note: forward these requests from Apache!). If the request is made from a known spider, everything is allowed; otherwise, everything is denied - a corresponding text file is returned; - a known spider makes a different request. If yes, the cache of 'static pages' is used to answer the request; - all other requests are passed to the code in WAKom. The 'cache of static pages' needs to be built up by the application. This might be application-dependent - the current solution certainly is, because it assumes that at the time the request is handled, the whole structure of the page is known. JanusSession can be used for Janus-aware subclasses and simply adds a method #addToPath:staticContents which does the same as the original #addToPath:, but also registers the passed static contents in the cache of static pages under the full path. Furthermore, JanusKom has a class-side method to register certain urls as indexes - this can be used to make sure that for certain urls an index rather than a page is returned, which might help in some cases to suck a bot into a site. So, when Janus decides to feed from the static pages cache, it returns a known page under the requested URL (if not overridden as an index URL) or, if no pages is found, an index. An index consists of a list of HREFs to all the static pages in the cache with the same prefix as the requested URL (I'm not sure there whether this is the best solution). Gardner (same MC repository) has been modified to support this. GWSession subclasses from JanusSession and calls #addToPath:staticContents:, and GWPage has a method #renderStatic to support this - the only difference is that this method renders path-based rather than Seaside-based HREFs. The end result should be that Gardner Wikis can be visited by spiders without problems, while still allowing you the freedom to add Seaside bells&whistles. Also, the spiders will not see any of the Wiki buttons etcetera, so they'll pull much less data from your site (they won't have access to all the old versions, for example). Furthermore, this might be a nice way to render static wikis - just hit the site with wget -m (which Janus thinks is a spider) and you get a copy. I've added a list of 158 user agent patterns I grabbed from The InternetOne's webserver logs, if there are any remarks about the list I'll be happy to hear it. There's still work to be done, like not writing the cache on every hit, etcetera, but at this time I'm mostly interested in comments about the operating principle. Regards, Cees

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SmallWiki questions
by Nevin Pratt 29 Nov '03

29 Nov '03

Let me see if I understand this... 1. The "contents" of a SmallWiki is a combination of pages, folders, and resources. 2. A "page" and a "resource" are components, and a "folder" is a composite of those two components. 3. A "resource" is some uploaded file resource, such as a sound, a video clip, or a picture. OK, what if I don't care to allow anybody to upload file resources? That would leave a "page" as the only interesting component left. And why bother having a composite (a "folder") of only one component? In other words, if I don't care to allow people to upload files to my SmallWiki, why would I be interested in anything other than pages (eg, children of type SWPage)? Nevin -- Nevin Pratt Bountiful Baby http://www.bountifulbaby.com (801) 992-3137

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Gardner, SmallWiki, Swiki, or?
by Nevin Pratt 28 Nov '03

28 Nov '03

Well, I want to plug a wiki into my site: http://www.bountifulbaby.com Click the "Forum" button on my site-- that's where the wiki will go. Or maybe I should say, when the "Forum" button is clicked, you are to be taken to my Wiki. The Wiki probably doesn't particularly need to be integrated with the rest of the site. Or should it? Hmm... I'm currently running Squeak 3.5, Comanche 5.x, Seaside 2.3b Which wiki should I try? Gardner seems cool, but as I mentioned, I don't particular see the need to have my Wiki be part of Seaside. Or just maybe I'm missing the big picture here, and not seeing some advantage that exists by integrating it with Seaside. Plus Gardner requires SmallWiki? And SmallWiki requires Comanche 6.x? And I'm running Comanche 5.x. Hmm, maybe I should just run another image for the wiki? How about I just download an existing Com/Wiki combo and run it as a separate image? Decisions, decisions... anybody got any advice? Nevin -- Nevin Pratt Bountiful Baby http://www.bountifulbaby.com (801) 992-3137

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Which class best suits a simple submission form?
by Samuel Tesla 24 Nov '03

24 Nov '03

First off, I love Seaside. It is very very cool. But I'm trying to follow the examples that are provided to figure out what to do for my app, and I can't help but think I'm making it too hard for myself. What I want to set up is a simple sign up wizard. Each page would verify the data before committing it to the model. There would be buttons like in a normal GUI wizard: next, forward, finish, cancel. The buttons would be active/inactive depending on which screen in the wizard they were in. I know it should be simple and straight forward, but I'm having trouble figuring out the (presumeably) obvious best way to do it. There are so many classes to inherit from and so many examples to try and mimic! I tried to follow the Store example as it was a multipage app, but the WABatchedList doesn't seem to really lend itself well. I saw a couple of classes in the Widgets group that seemed close to it, but they used links instead of buttons. I appreciate any suggestions. Thanks, Samuel Tesla --

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Seaside with Commanche file serving
by Brett Taylor 23 Nov '03

23 Nov '03

I am new to Seaside and need a little help. I have built an application using Seaside under Squeak that allows users to upload gif and jpeg images to a site, and then later display the same images. Right now, I convert the images to a Form, and when asked to display the image I use: html imageWithForm: aForm For performance and space reasons, I need to start serving the files off of disk. Eventually I'll probably switch to Apache, but for now I'd like to use Comanche to serve the files. How do I configure Comanche to serve the gif and jpeg files, and still maintain the WAKom server? BTW, Seaside is a great web development environment! Thanks, Brett Taylor

2 2

Excellent Opportunity fp zzy
by Fanny Woodruff 21 Nov '03

21 Nov '03

1 0

Authenticaing Multiple Users
by Sven Van Caekenberghe 21 Nov '03

21 Nov '03

In an attempt to authenticate multiple users for a Seaside app, I made a subclass of WAAuthenticatedSession and overwrote the method #authenticateUser:password: returning true or false based on our own test. This didn't work at all, not when choosing that session class in /seaside/config, and not when using WAController>>registerAsApplication:sessionClass: In both cases the effect was quite bizar: Seaside kept sending redirects until Safari gave up. What am I doing wrong, or is there a better approach ? Thx, Sven

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HTTP Performance
by Sven Van Caekenberghe 21 Nov '03

21 Nov '03

Let me start by saying that I like Seaside (and Squeak) a lot. I am really amazed at how much design and abstraction there is hidden underneath, and how flexible Smalltalk code really is (and how much fun it is to work in such a powerful integrated environment). However, since I started evaluating writing and deploying web applications in Squeak (only about two weeks ago), the final HTML interface as approached by a browser, felt a little bit slow. First, I re-implemented our calculator example in Lisp (minus the backtracking support), and it was clear that there was a significant speed difference: it was very easy to 'out-click' the seaside based calculator, which was a lot harder to do with the Lisp version. Then I decided to do a simple benchmark to really compare HTTP performance: http://homepage.mac.com/svc/DW-Bench/index.html I compared dynamic and static HTTP performance of JBoss, Lisp and Smalltalk. The Seaside/Comanche results for Squeak were consistent, but slow. I do not know enough about the performance characteristics of Squeak to have an educated opinion about these results. Does anybody care to run the tests themselves ? Does anybody, those with production Seaside/Comanche/Squeak based sites, care to comment ? What can be done to make things faster ? Sven

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Re: Background pattern
by Torsten.Bergmann＠phaidros.com 20 Nov '03

20 Nov '03

"Julian Fitzell" <julian(a)beta4.com> wrote in message news:3FBBAB33.1030204@beta4.com... >... > Hm, well if you want to add an attribute to the body, that's definitely > the way to do it. I started out writing an example of how you could do > it with the #style method but then realized you can't because it doesn't > have access to a renderer to get a url from. One way to get access to the renderer is to override the #renderAllOn: method to store the renderer in an instance variable: renderAllOn: html self renderer: html super renderAllOn: html So you are able to access it in the #style method which is called after that. Bye Torsten

1 0

HTTP Server Structure
by Sven Van Caekenberghe 19 Nov '03

19 Nov '03

Thanks to the excellent tutorials, it was no problem to start building Seaside applications. I am however at a loss at how the larger HTTP server infrastructure (Comanche ?) works. Does there exist *any* good/recent documentation about this ? By looking at some code and wiki pages, there seem to be multiple HTTP servers... For example, what is the right/simple way to serve some static files ? There seem to be several ways of doing it, but I can't get any of them to work reliably. Where can I learn more about this ? Thx, Sven

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seaside November 2003