[Seaside] Re: seaside hosting

[Avi Bryant]

On Apr 26, 2004, at 3:43 PM, Chris Double wrote:

> How would Seaside hosting work? Would an application be installed in a
> shared image, containing other applications from other users? I imagine
> this would be the most memory efficient for the hoster but would cause
> problems with editing, security, etc.

Yeah, I don't think that would be a very good idea.

>  Providing each user with a Squeak
> VM would be the other option but then how would the hosting provider 
> know
> that it is being used for Hosting web applications rather than for
> general purpose Squeak usage?

Well, how does anyone ever know that?  For sites that host PHP, for 
example, someone could conceivably write, say, an IRC server in PHP and 
get that hosted unknowingly... if you block all ports from the outside 
and make sure that they can only get through to their application 
using, say, mod_proxy through an apache vhost config (maybe allowing 
VNC traffic through as well so they can remotely administer  their 
image), it's unlikely they'll use it for anything but web apps.

You could also set things up so that they could only deploy package 
files, not full images - there would be a preconfigured Seaside image 
that their packages would get loaded into, running in a sandbox that 
wasn't directly user readable or writable.  This would give you a 
little bit more control, and possibly be more convenient for the users 
anyway.

You'd want to work really hard to strip this image down so that the 
memory footprint was as small as possible.  That's the main problem 
with Seaside hosting: you need machines with *lots* of RAM.

Avi