[Seaside] Hello!

[Dmitry V. Sabanin]

I'm new to this list, so I wanted to introduce myself and ask some  
basic questions.

My name is Dmitry, I'm from Russia and I'm a web-developer. Currently  
using Ruby on Rails. I have like 4 years experience with Ruby, 4  
years worked with PHP and 2 years with C. I was really interested in  
Smalltalk for quite some time. It looks like a really great language  
and environment, and it feels like very clean and powerful technology.

Right now I'm trying to learn basics of Squeak and Seaside to try  
developing Web apps with it.

Seaside looks very nice and sweet, but I'm concerned about lack of  
built-in object persistency layer (like ActiveRecord ORM in Rails). I  
wonder, what is the best way to implement that? Should I use some  
kind of DB driver and implement database accessing code by my own,  
using some of Martin Fowler's patterns or is there some other common  
way to do this?

I wonder if storing objects directly in the squeak image in some  
collection is the reasonable way to go? I've read a little about it  
on some wiki page, but it mentioned that it may cause data loss. Is  
anybody using this technique?
Is there any code that does this, with support for at least simple  
querying?

Also, I've read about object-oriented DBMS, but wasn't able to find a  
good multi-platform solution. I'm developing on Mac OS X and my  
deployment server will probably be FreeBSD and Linux, so I really  
need solution to be portable. Did I overlook something?

I'm asking all these questions just to understand what is the common  
way to solve the persistency issue, so forgive me if my questions  
sound dumb or ignorant. I really tried googling for all these stuff,  
but unfortunately didn't find anything sensible.

Thanks in advance for your answers!


Dmitry V. Sabanin
http://sabanin.ru