[Seaside] Newbie Questions

[Norbert Hartl]

On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 21:28 +0200, Piero Sartini wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am quite new to squeak and the whole smalltalk world. Without seaside, I 
> would never have looked at smalltalk ... I am very happy I did :-)
> 
> However, after playing around for two days and reading and watching everything 
> I could find on the net (thanks to Ramon for blogging about his 
> experiences .. his writings and screencasts are very useful to me!) there are 
> still some questions.
> 
Yes, this is very valuable source. And Ramon is very helpful guy ;)

> First of all, since I am particulary interested in seaside and web 
> development: Is there a nice docu about how to deploy an image to a server? I 
> assume this needs to be some kind of headless image - and then .. how to make 
> updates without shutting down the image? Has anyone already "standardized" 
> this procedures (and wrote them down;) ?
> 
You shouldn't care too much about deployment in the beginning. You can
use your development image and just start it headless on any server to
do its service. Later on you will divide the image you develop on and 
the image you deploy. You will add more tools which help you develop
and you will reduce the install base for your web app. For development
the answer could be the squeak-dev image. For the deployment the answer
is propably kernelimage which has everything stripped which you don't
need for a server app.
I'm myself in the progress of creating a deployment script. I have a
manually created base image (started from the official 3.9 image). And
I have a script which loads the latest code, closes windows, frees 
some memory and creates a derivate image which is able to deploy. 
 
> Next thing I do not understand completely is this oodb thing. I never did 
> anything with oodb and I could not find much information about Magma / 
> GOODS / .... - question is: are there good tutorials and which of this 
> solutions are stable and useable? I tried to install magma but after 
> telnetting to its port and feeding some random chars it crashed my whole 
> squeak .... 
> 
You shouldn't just telnetting. It is still a oodb ;) Getting into OODBs 
is quite easy as the reflect exactly what you model with your
programming. You just need to connect and request the top most entry in
the database (it is just a tree). 

http://www.shaffer-consulting.com/david/Seaside/SeasideAndGOODS/index.html

might be helpful for using GOODS with seaside.

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2665

gives the information about Magma you need. As long as you are not about
performance tuning the learning curve isn't very steep. Magma has its 
one Mailing List you should subscribe to if you like to use it. Chris is
also a very helpful guy (as nearly everybody in the smalltalk community
;) )
> Also I do not completely understand all these images. The "standard" squeak 
> image seems a bit colorful and I am not sure its the right one for developing 
> with all these graphics, painting toys and objects around which I do not 
> understand (yet) :-) I am using squeak-dev-beta-118W now, but there are much 
> playing toys around as well.
> 
The most important thing is the version number. 3.9 is the actual number
3.10 is in development. Which one to use you have to decide which tools
you want to use. I think most stuff is running on 3.8 image with moving
towards 3.9.
The flavours of images are for special purposes:
- squeak-dev : stuffed with goodies to ease development
- SMP : preinstalled modules to use the pier wiki with several
  persistence capabilities
- squeak official image
- kernelimage: A Image with only the necessary stuff to run installed
- minimalmorphic: a kernelimage with a base version of the graphical 
  engine
- ...
Take your time. You'll get into this automatically if you read this 
list and maybe the newbies and squeak-dev list.


> Any pointer to information is appreciated .. its quite hard to find a way 
> through all the broken links, but I am very enthusiastic about the whole 
> smalltalk world .. and I would love to learn more about it.
> 
You are welcome :)

Norbert