[Seaside] Enterprise readiness of Squeak/Seaside

[Jimmie Houchin]

Avi Bryant wrote:

>On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Jimmie Houchin wrote:
>
>>[snip]
>>
>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.
>
This is good to know.

>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.
>
I too would truly like for Squeak to have a great transparent 
persistence layer. I look forward to when it's here. However, I knew I 
could go with PostgreSQL or BSDDB. I haven't yet decided.

One thing I find interesting about ZODB is it different options for 
backend storage and its transparent ease of use.

>>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.
>
It would be nice if the problem was figured out and solved.

>>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.
>
Oh well. Seems to be the way it goes some times. :)
I believe Zope is similar when situated behind Apache.

><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>
>
Ra, ra!!! :)

I am not even close to being Smalltalk proficient/capable yet. But 
Squeak is where my heart is. I see all it can do, I see its potential. 
It is where I would prefer to put my time provided when I deploy my 
website it can handle it and has options to scale when needed. I would 
at least like to be able to throw hardware at it. :)

>BTW, what can you tell us about Zope3?  Any interesting new features we
>need to steal? ;-)
>
My exploration of Zope3 is very recent and not very knowledgable.

My primary understanding is that it is a re-architecting of Zope to make 
Zope a component architecture and to simplify the process of creating 
Zope components. It also seeks to reduce the amount of behind the scenes 
magic that Zope does so that all of Zope's operations are more explicit. 
This should improve the readability and understandability of Zope source 
and help reduce the learning curve for using and developing with Zope.

Good goals. But many are not issues with Squeak/Seaside.

 From my cursory reading of the mailing list they hope to have Zope3 
ready this summer.
I hope to deploy this summer.

>Cheers,
>Avi
>
Well Coach. :)
Should I make Squeak/Seaside my home? :)

Jimmie Houchin