[Seaside] question on database and scaling

[James Foster]

On May 12, 2008, at 5:53 AM, Chris Dawson wrote:

> I'm new to Seaside and am reading the great Seaside tutorial here:  http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/seaside/tutorial 
> .  I am somewhat unimpressed with the section on persistence.  I'm  
> looking for advice on how to build my application so that I can  
> scale when needed.  Should I be using GemStone/S?  Or, another OOP  
> database, like GOODS?  GOODS scares me as it looks like it is  
> supported by an individual, not a community or company.  Any advice  
> is appreciated.  What attracted me to Seaside was precisely the  
> notion that I could avoid dealing with scaling problems like you see  
> in Ruby on Rails.
>
> Chris

Hi Chris,

Welcome to Seaside. I've been reading the printed copy of the Potsdam  
tutorial and like it as well. One thing to note is that it is  
specifically tied to Squeak, so does not reflect the commercial  
offerings. For example, I think you will find that Cincom's approach  
(based on GLORP) will provide a very strong tie to a variety of  
industrial strength relational databases. See James Robertson's bog (http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/View.ssp 
) for more on that approach.

Of course, if you are building a new application and are not tied to a  
relational database, I'd recommend GemStone/S (but then I'm employed  
by GemStone ;-). We believe that GemStone's contribution to Seaside  
is, of course, persistence, scaling, and simplicity (avoiding O/R  
mapping). As to scaling, the design limits exceed whatever hardware  
you are likely to purchase (number of machines, CPUs, amount of RAM,  
amount of disk, etc.). We have (non-Seaside) customers with hundreds  
of machines connected to the same database, others with thousands of  
concurrent database connections, databases of hundreds of GB,  
thousands of transactions per second, response times measured in low  
milliseconds, etc.

GemStone/S Web Edition is available at no cost, even for commercial  
use, with the primary limitation of 4 GB of disk. For more information  
see http://seaside.gemstone.com. Dale's blog (http://gemstonesoup.wordpress.com/ 
) has a series of posts on scaling, as well as other good, up-to-date  
information. The Seaside work is in an open beta where anyone who asks  
is given access to the latest download.

James Foster
GemStone Systems, Inc.

>
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