[Seaside] Some very basic questions about replacing my webstack

[Philippe Marschall]

2009/4/8 Andy Burnett <andy.burnett at knowinnovation.com>:
> We currently develop web applications using IBM's Domino server.  I want to
> move us over to Smalltalk and Seaside, but I am having some problems
> understanding which bits we need to assemble in order to make the
> application stack (the problem with using Domino is that everything is
> included in one box, so that tends to insulate developers from needing other
> tools, and hence learning about them).  I would really appreciate it if
> someone could explain the 'mainstream' way of achieving our basic
> requirements.  Although we like Squeak, we are equally happy to go with VW
> and/or Gemstone if they are better/more reliable/easier ways to get what we
> need (and I realise that those criteria may well be in the eye of the
> beholder)
>
> The key facilities we need are:
>
> SSL connections (I now understand that this is handled by Apache)

Yepp.

> User registration and authentication.  LDAP would seem to be a good approach
> - particularly for single sign-on - but does Seaside talk with LDAP (it
> would be useful to get autheticated usernames in the apps)

Apache should do so.

> SMTP (in and out).  We would like to be able to generate emails and receive
> them into the applications - where appropriate

Works in Squeak. You might have to patch it if your SMTP server wants
authentication.

> Some sort of database.  We don't do very large scale data crunching, but we
> do need to be able to reliably store and retrieve subsets of objects.

For RDBMS Squeak has native PostgreS and MySQL drivers. There is also
an opendbx and odbj driver that support more databases. There are also
ODBMS in the form of Magma and GOODS available.

> Just to be clear, I don't want to burden anyone by asking for detailed
> descriptions, I just want to know - in broad terms - what we would need in
> order to replace the domino back end and allow us to develop apps in
> Smalltalk.

I can only recommend you to do a prototype.

Cheers
Philippe