[Seaside] [ANN] Seaside 3.0 (2.9 alpha 4) PORT for Dolphin

[GallegO]

Hi list,

I'm very pleased to announce I have sucessfully ported Seaside 2.9
Alpha 4 to Dolphin Smalltalk X6.

The port includes all the Seaside packages offered by the Seaside
Builder site (http://builder.seaside.st) when we select the
advanced tab. The port uses Swazoo so Swazoo 2.031 and Sport was ported too.
I took the previous versions of Sport (ported by Esteban Maringolo).
That save me a lot of work and time.

Another time saving decision was the way in which the file-in was
done. I implemented a native Installer class in Dolphin
so I can handle Installer scripts in the same format as the script
generated by the Seaside Builder site. I can handle
Monticello (zipped files), extract the source and import it into the
STS (Omnibase based) Dolphin Versioning Control System.
After the pharo/squeak source code is imported I can load the packages
from the repository into Dolphin.

The current state of the port is a pre-alpha with some bugs that can
be solved in a few days.
After that I have to organize the packages for a release candidate
that will be informed here.

For the stable releases I will try to provide Installer scripts as
does the Seaside Builder, with the packages know
as dialect neutral to be downloaded directly from builder.seaside.st,
and the Dolphin packages from other server.
I believe this kind of distribution ensures a fast way to be up to
date with the Seaside main codebase (Pharo).

Things that does not work (yet)
- Other codecs that WANullCodec. You can not get UTF-8 encoding for strings.
- Partial continuations (I dont know if Dolphin Smalltalk X6 supports
this, I hope it does)
- We have 20 failing tests, related with Encoding/Unicode and Partial
Continuations. The rest is green.

Things to highlight:
- The SPI (Seaside Performance Index) is 1350 on my computer (in the
same computer Pharo gets 750).
- The installation procedure is pretty straightforward, being amazingly fast.

All the other stuff is working
see advanced tab for alpha 4 on http://builder.seaside.st/

I 'm would like to thanks InfOil (the company where I work) by
supporting this port,
Guillermo Sapaya (Development Manager) to put me in charge of this
task and to the previous
"porter" Esteban Maringolo (who also works in InfOil) for his effort
done with the first
version of Sport, specially the sockets weird interface ;)

>From now on InfOil will be trying to maintain the latest version of
Seaside up to date in Dolphin.
We're going to publish the installations instructions during the next
week, be patient :)

Best Regards
Jose Sebastian Calvo
(GallegO)