On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 09:29:01AM +0100, Friedrich Dominicus wrote:
> Dear Smalltalker, I'm trying to get into Smalltalk a bit more
> seriously. I'm especially currently trying to get into Seaside
> programmming and the persistence of Objects. I found GLASS, which seems
> to be remarkabel in that aspect. Now I wonder

Welcome!

> 1) How does one do versioning in Smalltalk. AFAIU it seems, one files
> out ChangeSets which then can be read in in another image. Am I wrong
> about that?

ChangeSets are a traditional way of doing this, and are still very
useful for organizing your work (in Squeak they are associated with
Projects, so you can have a Project with a ChangeSet that represents
some aspect of the system that you are working on).

Nowadays, most serious work is done with the Monticello change management
tools. You can read about Monticello here:

  http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1287

So it is a good idea to learn how to use ChangeSets first, but as soon
as you have done this you will want to learn how to use Monticello for
version management and sharing your code between images.

> 2) How does one Data Migration in Smalltalk? I just know it from Rails,
> where one has migrations, but how's that done in the Persistence layers
> of some Smalltalk. E.g what happens if I add or remove instance
> variables?

I don't know enough about Rails to understand the question, but in
general it is straightforward to add and remove instance variables
in Smalltalk.

> There are somewhat related question but more about GLASS. I read teh
> gemstone soup up and down, and was able to install the Web Edition on my
> System also. It was a few days work but I learned a lot. However I found
> just a few videos about Gemstone, but not more "serious" use (with more
> database related stuff, scheme changes etc) Would you mind to share
> your experiences?

Probably others on this list can give you some ideas, but I'll mention
also that there is a Gemstone mailing list that may help.

  "GemStone Smalltalk Customer Forum" <gemstone-smalltalk at earth.lyris.net>
  List-Subscribe: <mailto:subscribe-gemstone-smalltalk at earth.lyris.net>
  List-Owner: <mailto:owner-gemstone-smalltalk at earth.lyris.net>

Dave