[Seaside] updateRoot: Weirdness

Jason Johnson jbjohns at libsource.com
Fri Jul 20 09:55:37 UTC 2007


sig wrote:
> Hey, lets look to the roots: Seaside serving http requests. And i can
> assure you, that for 99% of the users in the world, thing which
> serving http requests called web-server.

Except that this isn't what Seaside does.  Not exactly anyway.  If you 
are familiar with apache, then Seaside is what apache would call an 
"apache module".  You hook it into your Smalltalk web server, and it 
gets a chance to do things with the HTTP request, but no one would 
consider mod_python, mod_alias, mod_rewrite or any of those web 
servers.  They are just modules that will handle certain HTTP requests, 
if the web server is configured to forward the request to them.  Same as 
Seaside.

> And you saying 'standalone web server'.. It looks like you insist that
> seaside in 90% cases in not complete solution for _BASIC_ web
> solutions?
> Why it must force developer to use third party tools to be complete?
> Its better to be slow, as hog but be COMPLETE rather than flexible,
> complex, but incomplete...

And this I agree with.  We all chant the phrase "premature optimization 
is the root of all evil", but the "use apache" suggestions are exactly 
that.  Everyone should use an in-image solution (use Commanche/Swazoo to 
serve files as I do, or maybe this FileLibrary solution I saw someone 
mention) until they see the speed actually be a problem.  Then they can 
worry about more complicated things like a stand alone file server, load 
balancing and so on.  But most of us wont ever need that, so there is no 
reason to get side tracked for it.


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