New SqueakMap on the air... and we got problems Houston!

goran at krampe.se goran at krampe.se
Tue Apr 4 08:10:40 UTC 2006


Hi Andreas!

Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> goran at krampe.se wrote:
> > So... anyone got a bright idea or should we just suck it up and declare
> > SM to be 3.8+ country? Time to move to a Magma solution? Though it still
> > seems awkward to demand Magma client in all SM enabled images. :) Or
> > perhaps we could just use a good ole SmartRefStream? I dunno, eyes are
> > dried up by now.
> 
> How about some sort of well-formed output, like (dare I use the word?) 
> XML?

Hehe, well, I did consider that (a year or two back) but avoided it
because I didn't want to take on the "luggage" that serialization code
is (to be maintained for shape changes etc when the model evolves). Back
in the beginning of SM I used Smalltalk as format and it was cumbersome
to maintain it - but of course, then I also used an incremental model
which made it even more complex.

> I've attached a quick hack (well, okay it's been about an hour of 
> work ;-)

Don't you have better things to do? Like getting Crocodile out the door?
;) I can't help wondering why you ended up coding on this? Just curious.
:)

> that allows you to write a complete map w/ Yaxo (no read back 
> yet). It's just a proof of concept right now but the results (about 
> 10secs to write the whole thing in about 900k) are quite encouraging 
> (the current map takes about 500k but this version wastes lots of memory 
> -and time- for writing out duplicate information that could easily be 
> avoided).
> 
> Cheers,
>    - Andreas

Mmmm, let me say that I would like to hear more views on this issue
before deciding for the future. As I said XML has been on my radar but
my main idea had actually been to use SmartRefStreams and not just a
single one but instead "split" the model into accounts and enable them
to be stored on multiple servers (along the lines previously discussed
enabling personal, department, company and global wide maps etc).

But on the other hand - SmartRefStream and friends is probably just as
sensitive to these things as ImageSegment is. So...

...yes, we probably need to go the route of an explicit format unbound
to the domain classes and yes, then XML is "as fine as any". 

> PS. I'm not sure if this will run out of the box with 3.8 or 3.9 since I 
> used a Croquet image which has a few extra things in it. Let me know if 
> there are any issues.

Sure.

> PPS. If you're interested in a solution like this I should be able to 
> spend another hour or two on the read back side as well.

Let us see what others say in the community but yes, after typing this
email I am probably leaning towards this route - even though it "hurts"
going back to coding these things - Magma or ImageSegments etc are so
darn nice (when they work). ;)

And if I/we are going to do this I think we/I really should take a stab
at the "distributed approach" at the same time. If anyone is interested
in hearing a recap on that, just say "recap".

regards, Göran



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