Hi guys!

Just FYI, I don't track all of squeak-dev (no time), but I can promise 
to read and reply (to questions) on all threads mentioning SqueakMap in 
the subject.

Chris Muller knows SM in-and-out I would say and yes, the web UI is 
separated from the domain model. In fact, the *exact same* domain model 
is used in your image when you use SMLoader (or its cousins), SMLoader 
is just a "different UI" on top of it.

That was indeed one of the *key design points* that unfortunately was 
never really understood by large parts of the community - my guess at least!

The idea was always that we would maintain a map together, the domain 
model, and we could operate on it *in our own images*. This means that 
say, iterating over all packages and selecting a subset of them and 
installing them - that is trivially done in a few lines of code.

Frank: There is "no" client-server protocol to speak of. The client just 
does a HTTP GET to check the transaction counter of the domain model at 
the SqueakMap server - if its higher than the local counter - we do 
another GET to fetch a gzipped ImageSegment of the domain model.

...anyway, if anyone has any questions, feel free to ask and I will do 
my best to answer.

SIDENOTE: The web UI really sucks code wise. It was written using 
HttpView, my own web layer which actually inspired Avi in some ways when 
he did Seaside. Today I would personally just clone off the UI of 
SmalltalkHub (written all in Amber) or write a new one in Seaside or 
some other proper web layer. Both those approaches need some attention 
to "bookmarkable URLs though", SM is very restful which is IMHO very 
important to make things googlable. And oh, for any restful API I would 
use Seaside-REST, its really nice and I use it now in a project at 3DICC.

regards, Göran