[Seaside] Remote Development with Squeak/Seaside

[Andrew Catton]

Adrian Lienhard wrote:

> Hi Jimmie
>
>> Do most of the Seaside developers have regular physical access to the 
>> machines they develop and deploy including after deployment?
>
>
> I can't speak for all people of course, but in my experience - our 
> company has currently about five productive Seaside apps running - you 
> do not want to do anything more than loading new code in the deployed 
> images. Or else, it is an emergency you have to try to track down a 
> bug you can't reproduce or something. Doing any coding in the 
> productive app is just too risky. We develop always on our local 
> images, test it and then publish to our Monticello repository. The 
> only thing we then do is loading the new version in the deployed app. 
> Of course, sometimes you have to take care because, for example, 
> loading a new version which adds instance variables to a Seaside 
> component can cause problems for running sessions. What might also be 
> an issue is if you have changes in your database schema or domain 
> model and thus have to do transformations.

In our work at the University of British Columbia, Avi and I (and
previously Julian), take an even more conservative approach, wherein we
update an offline image, test that everything works, and then use Apache
mod_rewrite to gracefully move over from the previous running instance
to the new one.  This is quite safe, since the update is then an atomic
transaction with no danger of inconsistent code being run, and is fairly
quick as well.  Obviously, some types of database changes do require a
quick down-and-up, but this isn't that frequent.

>
> does anybody really develop on a deployed app? I can't imagine.
>
Only for demos/prototypes I would hope..

Cheers, Andrew