saving a purpose-built image?

Dave Mason dmason at sarg.ryerson.ca
Sun Oct 9 13:50:35 UTC 2005


Is there any way to produce a minimal image that could be subsequently
used as a server, for example?

My thought is that this would be a method in SmalltalkImage something like:

stripToObject: obj toFile: filename
   "remove anything unneeded by obj"
   | keepers |
   keepers:=Set new.
   self addObj: Set to: keepers;addObj: obj to: keepers;addObj: filename to: keepers.
   self fork.
   self removeAllBut: keepers.
   self saveToFile: filename

(Lots of details missing or wrong...)

This could be used to make an image of say, a Seaside application, that
could be subsequently started but would not have morphic, the compiler,
the UI, etc. if they weren't necessary.  This would be useful for
security as well as memory-footprint and performance reasons.

This seems somewhat related to spoon, but takes a different tack.  You'd
develop your app in full squeak, then drop a deployment image and
restart your production application.

Has anyone written anything like this?  Any advice?  (Yes, this relates
somewhat to my earlier research inquiries.)

Thanks  ../Dave



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