Tutorial Beta!

[Keith Hodges]

Hello All,

I think that the Magma seasideHelper and the tutorial are now ready for
some testing. The MagmaControlPanel is also looking pretty useful, since
you can see alll of the open sessions and explore your database and look
at your read strategies in detail.

Do note that since there are  7 different helpers and 6 different Read
Strategy options, there are many permutations that have not been tested
as yet. Some of the sessions have some innovative behaviour which has
not been tested in production at all (see the twist* below). These 7
helpers are my best guesses as to useful session management and commit
strategies in the seaside context.

Non-Shared Sessions

WAMagma - Basic one session per seaside session (with a twist - the
magma session is obtained AFTER the first page hit - since it takes 10
seconds to obtain a session on my machine).
WAMagmaBasicPool - As above - A pool of 5-15 sessions obtained in a
background process
WAMagmaMock - A Mock Session (MagmaCollections are NOT mocked since
Chris tells me they should work even if not persisted) This mock does
not require 'Magma sunit' package to be loaded unless your app goes
beyond the helper api and uses MagmaSessions directly.

Shared Sessions.

WAMagmaSolo - A Shared Session without auto refresh.
WAMagmaShared - A Shared Session with auto refresh.
WAMagmaSharedAuto - A Shared Session with auto refresh and auto commit.
WAMagmaSoloAuto - A Shared Session with auto commitAndBegin (and hence
includes auto refresh).

Of the last 4 options, WAMagmaSoloAuto is my favoured option as is it
the most transparent strategy. It is set as the default so that the
tutorial requires no configuration at all. It will probably work in a
non-Solo deployment, thus rendering WAMagmaSharedAuto redundant. If it
works well then the other three options could also be removed.

Now that the tutorial works I am now going to turn my attention to
porting the Pier-Persistency manager to use this scheme...

enjoy

Keith