[Seaside] i am dreaming of ...

[Dave Mason]

I had asked this on squeakdev, but got no reply.  As it's relevant to
this conversation, I'll ask again here.

Does anybody besides me think it would be convenient to have a method to
drop a cleaned-up image file from a development environment?  Cleaned-up
means essentially that you provide an object and that the image forks,
removes everything not required to run that object's #run method, and
then drops a .image file, which (upon restart) executes the #run method
for the object.  By removing the GUI, the compiler, morphic, etc. you
would get a smaller, more secure, and (potentially much) higher
performance image that could run anywhere without requiring a screen and
keyboard.  One would presumably put in a way to get it to cleanly
shutdown and invoke a new image, thus allowing incremental deployment.
In some ways this would provide an alternative to Spoon.

Does any such thing exist already?  This is not a trivial project
(because of dynamic typing and dynamic dispatch), but it's probably
quite doable.  The next piece of research following this is to compile
that image to native code, which would make it even easier to deploy on
web server farms.

Thanks for any pointers or comments.

../Dave