[Seaside] The best combination of stuff for SeaSide?

[Avi Bryant]

On Mon, 19 May 2003 Yoshiki.Ohshima at acm.org wrote:

>   It does mean that any database software is an option.  If PostgreSQL
> is "better" (in what sense?), I can go with PostgreSQL.  I thought
> MySQL is lightweight and easier to work with on my laptop computer.
> (Of course, later I'll set up a Linux box to host the back-end
> database.)

Well, if *any* database software is an option I might suggest you look at
OmniBase.  There's a small license fee to get the garbage collection
support, but it's a whole lot nicer (in my opinion) to work with a solid
object database than to try to deal with object/relational mapping.

However, if what you mean is any relational database, then you should keep
in mind that I know of at leasttwo Squeak database packages that currently
work only with PostgreSQL:
- GLORP, Nevin Pratt's port of Alan Knight's O/R mapping system.  This is
probably the framework with the most momentum and largest number of users
for doing relational mapping in Smalltalk right now.
- Roe, my relational algebra package.  If you're looking at hitting the
database directly, rather than going through a mapping layer, I'd strongly
suggest looking at this.  It lets you build SQL statements as smalltalk
expressions rather than strings, which lets you do all kinds of cool
things.

The PostreSQL driver is also more actively maintained than the MySQL
driver (although Colin has to some degree taken over the MySQL driver and
the situation is better than it used to be).

Then there are the usual arguments about MySQL lacking transactions,
views, subselects, etc, which may or may not be true anymore depending on
the version of MySQL you're using, and so I won't get into them.

I don't think MySQL is really significantly lighterweight than PostgreSQL.
If you want lightweight, look at SQLite (but again, there's not much
support for it except the bare driver).

>   Thank you.  I read some announcements from Stephan Pair on the
> CommancheNG.  Is it a good idea to adapt it (them?) at this point?

Honestly, once you're in the world of Seaside, it doesn't make that much
difference which version of Comanche you're using, because Seaside tends
to want to do everything (authentication, cookies, url dispatching) itself
anyway, and what little it needs from a webserver is provided even by the
earliest Comanche versions.

However, if the Seaside app is just one part of a larger collection of
things you need your server to do (like serve static files and manage
virtual hosts), then there's some nice stuff in Comanche 6.1.  I'm not
sure it's there yet in terms of stability (I've seen some quirks in 6.1
that weren't there in 5.1) but Stephen is putting a lot of work into it so
I'm sure any problems won't last long.

Avi