GLASS and CloudFoundry

I'm very interesting in your comments about CloudFoundry work for GLASS:

Anything to share? 

Well I have been planning to write an email talking about the plan for GLASS 2.0...so I guess I can shed a little more light ...

GLASS 2.0 is aimed at improving the develop in Pharo and deploy in GemStone experience.

VMware has recently announced the Cloud Foundry[1][2]:

  Cloud Foundry, a VMware-led project is the world’s first open Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. 

  Cloud Foundry provides a platform for building, deploying, and running cloud apps using Spring for 

  Java developers, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby developers, Node.js and other JVM frameworks 

  including Grails.

Peter McClain in the MagLev group has been hard at work implementing a MagLev service for the Cloud Foundry and currently has a working prototype where he can deploy a MagLev-based Sinatra app into a Cloud Foundry Micro Cloud. I plan to leverage Peter's work for building the same type of service for GLASS and Seaside for both GemStone3.0 and GemStone 2.x.

Personally I have not yet looked in detail at what is involved (the Cloud Foundry is implemented in ruby), but Peter has reached a point where it is time to start looking at following in his footsteps ... I will need to find out the best way for you guys to contribute if you are interested.

Metacello configurations will be used to specify the applications to be deployed into the Cloud Foundry, but if you are familiar with Metacello, you know that creating configurations is somewhat of a black art ... tIn the last several months I have been working on the MetacelloBrowser[3] to provide a GUI that runs in Pharo and GemStone to support the creation of configurations along with the whole Metacello-based development process ... Unfortunately I reached the point a couple of weeks ago, where the demands of the UI exceeded the capabilities of OmniBrowser ... THE GUI for GLASS ...

Couple this with the fact that GemTools is not a very snappy environment when working on a remote stone (note that there is no ssh access to the Cloud Foundry vms) and we've got trouble in River City...

So a couple of weeks ago I started development on Naviode[4]. Naviode is currently a proof of concept for a browser-based (read jquery and javascript) smalltalk development environment: 

  - "code browser"

  - debugger

  - metacellobrowser i

  - monticello tools

  - inspector

  - test runner

  - etc.

The basic framework in still in flux, but the basic idea is that Naviode is an Inspector Driven Development environment with an attempt to move away from a windows/menu orientation to something different in the browser...

Naviode is currently implemented in Seaside. Right now it runs only in Pharo and before you rush off to load it ... I'm not sure that the config is complete (one of the reasons I haven't written this email earlier:) 

The basic storyline for GLASS 2.0 goes something like this:

  1. develop Seaside app using Pharo

  2. with Naviode running in Pharo, deploy application to Cloud Foundry

  3. follow a link in Pharo-based Naviode to the GLASS-based Naviode running in the cloud

  4. use GLASS-based Naviode to continue development

  5. cycle back to 1.

Naviode is "too new to share" right now, but in a couple of days I'll be interested in comments on Naviode and eventually there will be plenty of room to contribute to that project.

The MagLev work was done in github. Right now Peter is working on a new issue, but I think that once that issue is addressed we can go about cloning the maglev repositories and start working on adapting the work for GemStone/S and GLASS.

Dale

[1] http://www.cloudfoundry.com/

[2] http://CloudFoundry.org/

[3] http://www.squeaksource.com/MetacelloBrowser.html

[4] http://seaside.gemstone.com/ss/Naviode.html

Nick,

If you want  to work on CF, I'd definitely use the MagLev discussion list. There has been some discussion there already.