Magma January 2006

magma@lists.squeakfoundation.org

6 participants
7 discussions

Next steps
by goran＠krampe.se 12 Feb '06

12 Feb '06

Hi Chris and all! I am using Magma now - though I haven't stressed it yet at all, still busy building my domain model. But it seems to "just work" for the moment - which is really nice. I noticed: http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5832 ...and accidentally that is exactly what I need. :) Now, it doesn't necessarily fit me - so I am using a prevaylerish approach with "command" objects that I also save to Magma so that I can reconstruct the model by applying the commands in sequence. This should give me a suitable mechanism to keep Magma database copies (offline clients) in synch with the master and also reasonable hooks to figure out "logical" conflicts. But I was just curious if you could share your current "thoughts" on the subject. Also, the security stuff in 1.1 is interesting - we might want to use repository file encryption (or just rely on OS level mechanisms for that - encrypted filesystems). Was there any other relevant changes with 1.1? regards, Göran

4 7

installing magma
by Paulo Sérgio Medeiros 12 Jan '06

12 Jan '06

Hi, i'm trying to install magma through monticello browser, but i can't resolve some class dependencies of MagmaServerLoader and KryptOn packages: BlockCipher and ElGamalPublicKey. Can anyone point me to these classes? Thanks! Paulo Sérgio.

2 1

1.1 - in a state of flux
by Chris Muller 11 Jan '06

11 Jan '06

Magma users, until the KryptOn critiques and refinements are fleshed out, I suggest only using 1.1 for experiments. Otherwise, we will have to convert all of our keyring files. Until then, you may install "Magma1.0" from SqueakSource. - Chris

2 1

New user: error creating repository
by Timothy Reaves 08 Jan '06

08 Jan '06

I just installed the latest Magma, and when I execute MagmaRepositoryController create: '/Users/me/Development/magma/one' root: Dictionary new I get a MessageNotUnderstood error. Rijndael class>>asMakoEncryptable Have I forgotten to do something? I do believe I have created my key properly.

1 0

[ANN] Magma 1.1
by Chris Muller 07 Jan '06

07 Jan '06

After months of careful work and "growing pain" I am pleased to announce the newest release of Magma. Magma "1.1" is my earnest attempt to answer complex security requirements; encryption, authentication and authorization, in an object-oriented way. Striving for high security, high transparency, and a straight-forward implementation, the main objective has been to permit a two-tier architecture, Magma servers running naked on the Net, safe from malicious hackers. Also notable is strict adherence to the philosophy that no sensitive information ever leaves the image memory so, for example, even attackers heisting the db files directly from the OS will find all Byte buffers are encrypted. Specific information can be found at: http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5832 Deployment: The three "Loader" packages on SqueakSource now load 1.1. Note "Cryptography 0.3" from SqueakMap is now required. I will get SqueakMap updated in the next few days (I have spaces in my package names so I have to figure it out). This is a significant release in several ways. For posterity I have saved a new package, "Magma1.0," the prior version without security, for posterity. Cheers! Chris

1 0

[ANN] KryptOn 1.0
by Chris Muller 06 Jan '06

06 Jan '06

I'm pleased to announce the fruit of my cryptography studies! I've completely reworked the swiki page. http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5785 And the shiny new code is on SqueakSource and SqueakMap; much cleaned from that initial alpha version months back. I hope the months of careful consideration, detailed implementation, and high scrutiny has resulted in something useful or educational to others. Most of my guidance came from internet resources, but with notable help on difficult design decisions from John McIntosh, Andrew Gaylard, Cees and Goran. Thank you all. For the sake of confidence in this work, I have created a Swiki page specially inviting KryptOn critique. http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5838 Cheers! Chris

1 0

Some questions
by goran＠krampe.se 06 Jan '06

06 Jan '06

Hi Chris and all! As some of you heard I am busy building a pilot of an issue tracker at a customer. I am using Seaside, Magma, Kilaeua and probably Mewa. Being an old GemStone lover it is really, really nice to finally be able to use Magma for real. The application I am building will approximately take a man-year to complete fully, some info: 1. 350+ total number of users, perhaps 50-100 concurrent. 2. The current old tracker has 10000+ issues in it which has been collected over 2-3 years I think. These will be migrated so we are starting at 10000+ and working upwards from there. :) 3. The new system is intended to support offline operation, meaning that users will be able to make a standalone installation on their laptops and then replicate a portion of the model to it, work offline, and then sync up later. I will be using a "prevaylerish" pattern to accomplish that, or call it a Command pattern if you like. I also note the existence of Magma's forwarding proxies (might get handy). So yes, the laptops will in that case run a local Magma with a subset of the full db. 4. The spec is written by me, about 30 pages. It includes some pretty advanced meta facilities, workflow graph, permission model, dynamic forms, subscriptions/notifications, scripts yaddayadda. Perfect for Smalltalk, Magma, Seaside of course. Now, after having gotten my few first lines of code running (stealing a bit from Cees' Nags app) and getting a grip on the current strategies chosen by Kilauea and Brent (MagmaSeaside integration) I have some questions regarding sessions: Kilaeua has a connection pool so for each request a Magma session is picked from the pool and the whole request is wrapped in a Magma #commit:. Then the session is released back into the pool. This means that we will only have as many Magma sessions as we allow concurrently served requests. This is of course a far smaller number than the currently logged in users, in my case perhaps 10-20 (just from the hip). Note: the pool seems like a handy addition to Magma, but we can discuss that when it is fully battle tested and commented. :) Brent's code (MagmaSeaside integration) uses one MagmaSession per Seaside session I think. This would in my case potentially turn out to be 100... Now my questions: 1. Regarding wrapping each request in a commit - how costly is that? The abort/begin is of course needed (and how much does an abort cost if no modifications have been made?), but how much does the commit cost if I say do no modifications but have a large "read set"? I am guessing this is much cheaper if I use WriteBarrier? Is the WriteBarrier code fine to use? 2. Most of my requests will of course be readonly. Would a different approach be interesting - like for example, all requests share the same "readonly session" and if they don't end up doing modifications (the developer needs to know of course) - it is fine. This would mean multiple Squeak processes using the same Magma session - which I guess is fine as long as I protect the calls to the session object and make sure my domain model is thread safe (but since we aren't doing modifications it ought to be). Then - when a request decides to actually change something - it would allocate another session from the pool, make the modification, and release that session. Most kinds of objects in my domain model will be few enough to agressively cache - but 10000+ issues replicated over 10-20 or even worse - over 100 Magma sessions is a bit too much. The above approach (using a shared readonly session with an aggressively cached model, and then have 10-20 other sessions in a pool for actual commits) would typically save a lot of ram and also avoids the unneeded commit at each request end. It could also use fewer aborts by simply using a shared "some just performed a commit"-flag and then only do an initial abort if that flag is set. 3. ...and finally - if I don't hold onto my domain objects, but only the session - will they be gc'd? I assume this since I think the session uses Weak structures to hold the objects. So if I want to explicitly "hold onto" parts of my model - I would need to do that myself I assume. Thanks in advance for any replies. And yes, this is all "premature optimization" - but I just want to make sure I don't code myself into a corner. And I want to hear what other people are doing. :) regards, Göran

1 0

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

Magma January 2006