Pharo and Magma

[Andy Kellens]

Hello,

To start, I must say that I am new to this mailing list, that I  
started using Magma about a month ago and that I definitely am  
impressed by it's features and easy-of-use.
For a project that we recently started (a Seaside app), we are  
thinking of using Magma as the database backend.
While I skimmed through the archives of this list and realize that  
there already was quite some discussion about the relation of Magma  
and Pharo, I am a bit confused about the current status of running  
Magma on Pharo.
For instance, the wiki (http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2665) mentions  
that Pharo is supported, however I keep running into a number of  
problems.

1. One of my first attempts in using Magma involved loading r42final  
and trying out a client/server setup.
While I had no problems starting the server in one Pharo image, it is  
impossible to connect to the repository using the client.
I always get an error stating the Socket supposedly timed-out and no  
connection could be made (although it took no where near the 30 second  
time out to give me the error).
(I verified that my code was correct by also trying it out in a Squeak  
3.10 image, which worked like a charm).

2. My second attempt involved running the database in a local image.
I must say that this solution works very well, however I have a  
feeling that the system works incredibly slow.
To test the system, I created a database containing approximately 30  
objects stored in 1 Dictionary and 4 MagmaCollections (for which I  
defined an Index).
While I read somewhere that creating a database session can be quite  
slow (this is not a problem for our application), I was a bit  
surprised to see that adding single objects to the database is also  
very slow (I tried to profile my code and addition of objects took  
between 800 and 1200 ms).

My first thought was that these problems are due to the differences  
between Pharo and Squeak, but reading the archives gave me the  
impression that there are people out there who got Magma to run  
successfully on Pharo and I was hoping that they might share their  
experiences or confirm that they encountered similar problems.

For completeness: I have tried out the latest 4 releases of Pharo  
together with Magma (all the releases from September and the first one  
of October) on the Squeak 4.2.1 and 4.2.2 VM for Mac OS X.


Many thanks.

Kind regards,

Andy