[Seaside] Seaside / smalltalk: tools and scalability

[Jared Nuzzolillo]

Greetings friends.

As a web developer and passionate programmer, I am completely enamored with
dynamic languages. Sadly, I have little experience with smalltalk. I've
written some toy smalltalk code in the past, but most of my relevant
knowledge derives from my ruby experience and smalltalk reading material.
I've been considering delving back into smalltalk, but recent changes at
work have encouraged me to delve into it sooner rather than later.

To get started, I skimmed some tutorials, watched some videos and downloaded
the Developer Image mentioned on this page:
http://seaside.st/Download/Images/.

So, here are some questions:

1. Should refactoring using the R button on the Class Browser work? As a
test, I tried to rename the stop method of the WAKom class? I get an error
message to the effect of "doesNotUnderstand #getArgumentPermutation". Is
there some other image I should use? I am running windows for development. I
am open to using another, free VM instead of Squeak, if it works better out
of the box. I need a rich class and method browser, refactoring, debugging,
syntax highlighting and preferably code completion. I don't mind installing
"packages" to the image either.

2. Are there any examples of Seaside (or another, similar smalltalk based
server) running heavy-load sites? What is the largest (in terms of load)
site and what sort of traffic does it receive (or alexa rating if
available)? Is it trivial to set up? Part of this exercise is to determine
whether moving to Smalltalk is a viable solution performance-wise as opposed
to moving to java as is currently being planned by my employer.

3. I absolutely need to have good source control that will work for, say,
two dozen developers working on one project. Is there some thing nice that
works with #1 above?

4. Is there any educational material I just "have to" devour? A video?
Tutorial or pdf? A classic text?

Thank you, all. I am really exciting to begin this journey, and I hoping to
get a head start from your collective wisdom.

Best wishes,
Jared

ps. I realize 1 and 3 are somewhat off topic, but, since I thought there
might be a "turnkey" (hate that word ;)) solution, I thought it'd be ok to
ask.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/seaside/attachments/20070417/7201372f/attachment-0001.htm