[Seaside] Introduction / Apache integration / etc.

Damon Anderson damon@spof.net
Mon, 18 Mar 2002 21:11:32 -0600


I recently got back into Squeak and discovered Seaside, and I love it.
I've been dreaming about transparent web development for years and never
got around to implementing anything myself (mostly because I recognized
the need for continuations, but didn't feel like writing all of my web
apps in lisp).

While I wouldn't call myself an expert, I have some experience with
persistence/transactional systems in other languages and might be able
to do some hacking on whatever is integrated into Seaside. I have a
feeling I'm also going to end up needing RDBMS support of some kind, so
I might look into either Oracle or (probably sooner) Postgres support.

Also, I don't feel comfortable with Squeak listening on an open port on
my server, so I've been thinking about going down the same avenue as
Apache/Tomcat: have Squeak listen on a port bound to localhost and write
an Apache module which forwards certain requests to Squeak. Has anybody
else worked on something like this? I haven't looked into it much yet,
but it seems to me like might be easiest to implement the "Warp"
protocol in Squeak/Seaside and use the existing Apache webapp module.

As soon as I feel confident enough about the safety and manageability of
server-side Squeak development I'm going to set something up on my web
server. Lately I've been thinking about automatic data aggregation/
cross-referencing, so I might experiment with that in Seaside.

-damon