[Seaside] Enterprise readiness of Squeak/Seaside

[Avi Bryant]

On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Jimmie Houchin wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am in the process of selecting a tool for developing my current web
> project.
> Currently it is between Squeak and Zope3 (which is development).

<snip>

> What issues does Squeak/Seaside face to be enterprise ready concerning
> stability and scalability?

I have been developing in Seaside daily for the last two months with no
stability issues.  As far as I know, nobody has yet deployed a Seaside
application, so it's hard know what the scalability issues will be.  One
thing I would like to see is a load-balancing system with session affinity
to easily distribute a Seaside app across multiple images and multiple
machines.  As people begin to actually deploy Seaside applications, this
and other issues will surely come up, but we'll do what we can to resolve
them.

Although you didn't ask this, the real issue I see for Squeak right now is
the lack of a great persistence layer.  There are a few options out there
right now (JamStone, MinneStore, a PostgreSQL driver), but nothing on the
scale of the ZODB and ZEO.  Cees and I are both working on this in our own
ways, but I don't know when either of us will have something to release.

>
> The last time I used Squeak on my Linux machine (it has been awhile, it
> is currently not working, dead MB) just checking email with Celeste
> consumed almost all of the cpu.

CPU usage does seem to be an issue on unix.  There have been various
proposed solutions but as far as I know nobody has actually done anything
about it yet.  One of these solutions involves mindlessly wrapping each
system call in sqXWindows.c to be safe for use with ITIMER; I may just
sacrifice the time to do this myself if it comes down to it.
>From what I can tell, this should bring CPU usage down to reasonable
levels.

> Has anyone looked at mod_smalltalk?

Seaside has support for mod_lisp, which is similar to the FastCGI, Tomcat,
etc, modules - apache delegates requests to Seaside over a socket.  This
is useful for integrating with an existing apache setup, although in terms
of performance it's only slightly better that just using Comanche.

<PepTalk>
Seaside is brand spanking new, so it's impossible to give any guarantees
about enterprise readiness.  What I can guarantee is that those of us
working on it have every intention of making it a solid, scalable platform
for web development, and will do what it takes to make that happen.  Like
any open source project, the more of you there are out there pushing its
limits, the better it will be.  Zope is a safe solution - it has a huge
user base and years of development.  But Squeak and Seaside kick its ass
feature-wise and architecture-wise, and will always do so.  Plan for the
future. ;-)
</PepTalk>

BTW, what can you tell us about Zope3?  Any interesting new features we
need to steal? ;-)

Cheers,
Avi