[Seaside] GemStone/S Deployment and a little more questions

[James Foster]

Oleg Richards wrote:
> Hello Guys!
>
> I've heard about GLASS project (pre-configured image with GemStone 
> Linux Apache Seaside Smalltalk).
> Can somebody help me to make a test deploy on something like that? Are 
> there any tutorials about
> deploying seaside application to gemstone? I've heard that you have to 
> have monticello package for it.
> Can i deploy my seaside application, if i've developed it in Visual 
> Works? (I think that i didn't used any
> VW specifics, only basic collections and seaside). What should i do 
> with collections (what classes and what
> find methods) should i use for gemstone deployment. And can somebody 
> say me what steps should i do
> to fully deploy my application on gemstone platform. I
>
> Cheers, Oleg 
Hi Oleg,

Thanks for your interest in GLASS. As Philippe said, GLASS is not quite 
ready for general availability. Furthermore, as is typical in these 
projects, docs (including tutorials) are likely to be minimal at first. 
The people who will likely have the most success at first are those with 
some background in GemStone, but we certainly want any Smalltalker to be 
able to get up to speed quickly.

There isn't anything special about coming from Squeak, except that it is 
easy since GS can load Monticello packages. You don't, however, have to 
start in Squeak and use Monticello. In general, a Seaside application 
should just be a Seaside application. One of the nice things about 
Seaside is that it should not include any client UI code (where 
Smalltalk dialects have traditionally been most different). The primary 
challenge of coming from VW (or Dolphin!) is that GS does not have a 
trivial way to load VW code.

You should not have to do much with collections. GS should implement the 
ANSI spec for collections, so if you stay away from dialect-specific 
extensions to the base classes you should be fine. As you get further 
into scaling you application in GS, you may wish to switch some 
collections over to "Reduced Conflict" collections (that better handle 
multiple VMs changing a collection). This is a somewhat advanced topic 
that Dale will probably cover in his blog 
(http://gemstonesoup.wordpress.com/).

If you want to run GLASS in the VMware appliance, you will need to be on 
64-bit hardware that supports virtualization. Otherwise, you will need 
to be on 64-bit Linux. Otherwise, keep an eye on 
http://seaside.gemstone.com/ for more information.

James Foster