[Seaside] Seaside updater

[Richard Eng]

I'm a semi-retired software engineer. From 1980-2000, I worked for a variety
of companies working in a variety of application domains (database apps,
real-time control, communication software, and device drivers). My last job
was at ATI Technologies (now AMD) as Project Team Leader of the Windows NT
Driver Group.

My very first programming language was Fortran, but most of my career has
been in C. (I dabbled a little bit with C#.)

When I started this project last June, I knew nothing, absolutely nothing,
about web development. I had to bootstrap myself ten different ways,
learning about Linux Server (without a GUI), Apache, DNS, SSL, CSS, HTML,
and video streaming. My work was continually hampered by my aging (read:
failing) memory. (Oh, to be 30, again!)

The resources that helped me most included the few tutorials I could find on
the Internet about Seaside/Squeak, CSS, and Linux, as well as many forum and
blog postings about Apache, PostgreSQL, Darwin streaming server, etc. In
fact, I relied very heavily on these forum postings *but*, and this is a big
'but', far too many of the postings were either obsolete, incomplete,
misleading, or just plain wrong! I've lost count of the number of times I
was supremely frustrated because of this.

One of the BIGGEST headaches I faced was trying to figure out how to do
load-balancing (whether it's with Apache or some other server). Also, I had
a hard time with SSL (and Apache).

Recently, I struggled enormously with DNS and virtual hosts.

All in all, it has been a tremendous and positive learning experience. I am
gratified by all the Seaside people who have contributed excellent blogs
(you know who you are) and tutorials.

What would I have loved to find out but did not? Nothing, really. I
eventually got all my questions answered and issues resolved. However, it
was not without enormous frustration and being led down dead-end trails. I
guess I wish there was a single, well-organized repository of information
that would help people get up to speed quickly and easily with regards to
how to build a Seaside-based website. This would entail:

- How to setup Apache proxy. (In general, how to host your Seaside app on a
Linux server.)

- How to secure your website with SSL.

- How to scale your website with load-balancing.

- How to send out emails from your Seaside app.

- How to load-test and stress-test your website. (A vital issue for
commercial Seaside apps.)

And so on. Much of the information is scattered throughout the Internet and
it is very, very time-consuming to track it all down.

Richard


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Stephane wrote:

Just out of curiosity. What was your background as programmer and what
were the ressources that helped you the most
and what you would have love to find but did not?

Stef