Just a thought...

While looking on the net for some Dolphin related info, I noticed a lot
of interesting goodies, projects, add-ons but the Dolphin community
seems to suffer from the same problem the Squeak community has...  Most
of the web pages/packages/fileouts/whatever out there are outdated and
from an outsider's perspective, it seems like:

a) no one cares
b) the product no longer exists or is dying
c) not a huge community so don't expect much support...
d) the people or the product are not worth maintaining up-to-date info

Besides the wiki is still unaccessible and the webring contains, for the
most part, outdated sites...

We work/play/whatever with a **GREAT** product used by great people so
why don't we update our stuff on the web and show'em all that we're not
an endangered species and that Dolphin is alive and well!!!

I work all day with VAST and it makes me cry that I don't have an
IdeaSpace in that environment...  I've always preferred VW but having a
*real* Windows environment is a real plus for most clients...  I play
with Squeak but it lacks a decent UI framework...

The only things I'd like in Dolphin is some kind of basic reporting tool
(I know, VA reports suck but at least you have something!), a Seaside
port and a "we'll show them all" attitude...

Keep up the good work OA!!

Back to my packages...  :)

Benoit St-Jean schrieb:

I think the problem ist simply time. You create s weppage on Dolphin,
but then you are lost in time in Dolphin. The Dolphion user wants to
create applications, not web pages.

> Besides the wiki is still unaccessible and the webring contains, for the
> most part, outdated sites...

I think, the wiki will be available in the near future. The gsug wiki
was activated for some day: <http://gsug.seaside.org>.

When it is available, we could add a side to actual wep pages about
Dolphin.

A further thought would be to establish a public reposity like CPAN.
Directly accessable from Dolphin Smalltalk.

> The only things I'd like in Dolphin is some kind of basic reporting tool
> (I know, VA reports suck but at least you have something!), a Seaside
> port and a "we'll show them all" attitude...

Seaside? Why someone would want to have Seaside available in Dolphin?
Dolphin is created as an environment to create Windows desktop
applications. Not to host a webserver.
I've thought by myself about using Dolphin to create dynamic web pages.
Here in Germany there exists some providers who provides windows web
hosting or further windows servers. But at the moment, it is a little
expensive to simply test this machines. Linux hosting is cheaper, and
with a Linux server, here in Germany often called simply "Root-Server",
you get the full power of Linux. You are even able to install your own
Linux-Distribution. The system provides an emergency console, where
your server is booted over the NIC. So you have full access to the HD
to wipe them out and write your own image to it.
So, from a practical view, Dolphin would'nt provide an advantage IMO.

Best regards,
Marc Michael

Hi,

> A further thought would be to establish a public reposity like CPAN.
> Directly accessable from Dolphin Smalltalk.

As someone responsible for more than a few of the outdated
webpages/packages, this is the option that appeals most to me.

> Seaside? Why someone would want to have Seaside available in Dolphin?

I tend to agree with this. I have used Seaside-Squeak a couple of times
in the past year and it has been very nice to work with.

> Linux hosting is cheaper

I don't want to start an OS war :) but just point out that the price
difference between linux and win2003 servers is often only $10 a month.
I read a rumor that Microsoft are almost giving away licenses to the
big hosts to try and grab back server market share.

I have rented a win2003 dedicated server from servermatrix for the past
year, and at the time I signed up the cost of lunix or win2003 standard
was the same. No doubt there are cheaper linux options, especially if
you are looking for shared or virtual hosting, but for dedicated
servers my observation is they cost much the same.

> with a Linux server, here in Germany often called simply "Root-Server",
> you get the full power of Linux. You are even able to install your own
> Linux-Distribution. The system provides an emergency console, where
> your server is booted over the NIC. So you have full access to the HD
> to wipe them out and write your own image to it.

You get the same level of access with a windows 2003 dedicated server.
Personally I am more familiar with windows, and I find it easier to
administer a windows box than I would a linux box.

I have been running Dolphin CGIs to create some dynamic content for a
while, but just recently started experimenting with an image running on
the server connected to my local STS repository via RDP/TS mapped local
drives. A bit slow at times, but it worked.

For much the same price, as a linux box, the benefit to me of being
able to use RDP to administer the server, as well as run any dolphin
executable, or even use an image on the server as if it was running on
my local machine, made the choice of going with windows the right one
for me.

YMMV, there is no one right answer for everybody, but I wouldn't write
off Dolphin running on a server as an option.

Steve
--
Steve Waring

Folks,

> You get the same level of access with a windows 2003 dedicated server.
> Personally I am more familiar with windows, and I find it easier to
> administer a windows box than I would a linux box.

Snap!

<snip>

> For much the same price, as a linux box, the benefit to me of being
> able to use RDP to administer the server, as well as run any dolphin
> executable, or even use an image on the server as if it was running on
> my local machine, made the choice of going with windows the right one
> for me.
>
> YMMV, there is no one right answer for everybody, but I wouldn't write
> off Dolphin running on a server as an option.

Well, as many of you know, we do exactly this. The Object Arts site is
hanging off a big pipe on a rented server in London Dockalnds running
Windows 2K3. The site itself uses Swazoo serving up the My Dolphin
pages and to handle some e-commerce bits. At the backend is an Omnibase
database. On the same server we run www.dalektron.org which is also in
Swazoo and this maintains the web-based score table for the game.

In both cases Swazoo under Dolphin is also serving out the HTML pages
too. Whilst I wouldn't recommend Dolphin for serving up pages for a
large site, it seems to work quite well for small/medium traffic
applications. The programming, although perhaps not as easy as in
Seaside, is still very pleasant for a Smalltalker when compared with
having to drop down into Perl/Php etc.

Best regards

--
Andy Bower
Dolphin Support
www.object-arts.com

I would love to have Seaside available in Dolphin. Why? Dolphin is my
favourite programming environment but the web is my preferred
deployment environment.

I want both. I don't see why I can't have both. Just because D6 is
great for desktop applications doesn't mean it can't be great for web
stuff too!

At the moment I go elsewhere when I want to write for the web. That
makes me sad.

Seaside is amazing but Squeak holds it back. If Dolphin ran Seaside it
could kick major butt. I love Rails but a Dolphin powered Seaside would
beat it hands down.

I'm not alone in my thoughts here. I've spoken to a bunch of other
people who feel the same.

Rob & Others

As I see it there are a couple of issues holding back a port of Seaside
to Dolphin. I haven't looked at it directly but I believe that the
Continuations support in Dolphin is not compatible with the latest
version of Seaside. Blair originally implemented Continuations in
Dolphin 5 in order to be able to support the first version of Seaside.
Unfortunately, it seems that Seaside 2 has changed significantly and
now these Continuations are no longer usable.

So, to continue (!) we are probably going to need to get Blair on board
in order to visit the Continuations in D6 in order that the Seaside
port can be completed. The difficulties here are:

1) Blair is no great believer in Web services... or rather, he sees
them as a step back in time to the "dumb terminals talking to
mainframes days" of yore and, therefore, finds them rather less than
exciting and of little interest. Blair, please correct me if I'm wrong
here.

2) The current Seaside implementations available for Squeak or
VisualWorks are not test-based. This means that it will be very
difficult to ascertain whether any port is working correctly. In
particular, with regards to the Continuations, I don't believe that
Blair will engage in any work in this rather tricky area until he has a
set of tests that dictate exactly how the Continuations are meant to
behave. As I said, we have already implemented them once and now the
"specification" has changed silently so it seems fruitless to keep
chasing a moving goalpost.

3) We did have an offer from Avi Bryant to look at making the port for
a (reasonable) few thousand dollars. From the point of view of
increased Dolphin sales, however, this was hard to justify so we
decined (plus the fact there would be an ongoing maintenance expense
too). My guess is that any version of Seaside running under Dolphin 6
will be expected to run under the free Community Edition of Dolphin.
This makes it harder to justify any large costs.

So, in order to progress, my guess is that we need one of two things.
Either a set of failing tests that dictate how the Continuation support
should work in Seaside (and hopefully for some other aspects of the
code too) or a community effort to raise around $2.5K so we can
commision Avi to do the port.

Best regards

--
Andy Bower
Dolphin Support
www.object-arts.com

Thanks for the response Andy. Here's my thoughts

1) I find this a bit surprising from a company that ( and this is just
a guess ) can only exist because of the 'Net. That said, if Blair
doesn't enjoy web things ... fair enough.

2) I'm a TDD fanatic ... so I can appreciate where Blair is coming
from. There has been discussion on the Seaside newsgroup from time time
about the idea of defining an interface - services that the underlying
implementation has to provide, exactly where this has got to, I have no
idea.

3) I've purchased the pro version of the last two editions of Dolphin.
Without support for a good web framework, I won't be upgrading again. I
almost didn't this time. I use Dolphin in my spare time for fun and it
doesn't tick enough boxes without this.

I guess I'm the opposite of Blair, I tend to view desktop applications
as a holdover from the 80's client-server experiment. I guess the truth
is somewhere in the middle.

I'd be willing to kick in $150 towards the cost of some Avi time. But
with his push on Dabble I'd be surprised if he was available. I can
hope.

If Seaside only worked on the commercial version that would be a strong
selling point. I know at least a dozen people who've given up on
Seaside because they hated Squeak and VW didn't have licence terms they
could/would live with. I'm not saying you should arrange it that way,
but if it does, that's fine-by-me.

Hi Andy,

> The Object Arts site is hanging off a big pipe on a rented server
> in London Dockalnds running Windows 2K3.

Do you mind answering some questions?

 - Do you deploy the swazoo servers, or are they running in images?
 - If they are running in images, do you use some kind of srvany
utility to run them as services, or do you leave a terminal session
running and connect/disconnect to it, or??

> In both cases Swazoo under Dolphin is also serving out the HTML pages
> too. Whilst I wouldn't recommend Dolphin for serving up pages for a
> large site, it seems to work quite well for small/medium traffic
> applications.

FWIW: A solution to this is to use something like ISAPI rewrite (
http://www.isapirewrite.com/ ) as a reverse proxy to map parts of an
IIS website's url namespace through to a swazoo server. I have used it
and it works well. IIS serves out the static content and requests for
dynamic content are seamlessly passed through to swazoo.

Another benefit is you can use IIS's authentication, and although I
have not tried it, apparently it can handle https requests and reverse
proxy them as http requests.

Steve
--
Steve Waring

Steve,

> > The Object Arts site is hanging off a big pipe on a rented server
> > in London Dockalnds running Windows 2K3.
>
> Do you mind answering some questions?
>
>  - Do you deploy the swazoo servers, or are they running in images?
>  - If they are running in images, do you use some kind of srvany
> utility to run them as services, or do you leave a terminal session
> running and connect/disconnect to it, or??

Really the latter. I used to use some commercial version of svrany (I
can't remember what it was now) but the W2K3 server has been generally
so reliable that it hasn't really been necessary to make the images
services so I dropped it.

The Dalektron server is actually a deployed EXE and the OA server is a
development image. There's no real reason they are separated.. if I was
to set it all up again I'd probably combine both in the same
development image. Both of them are just started at logon. We use RDC
to logon and talk to the server and the Window is usually up so it is
easy to see if the server has gone down. Typically, if you find that
the OA server is not responding, in the past it has been the ISP's net
connection at fault rather than the actual server box.

That's a nice idea but frankly I got fed up with IIS after I discovered
I couldn't easily get your Dolphin FastCGI stuff working on it (I
forget why now). Also, quite a few of the pages are run through a sort
of template/macro expander and given the amount of traffic I think it's
more fun just to run the lot through Swazoo.

--
Andy Bower
Dolphin Support
www.object-arts.com

Steve,

> > Another benefit is you can use IIS's authentication, and although I
> > have not tried it, apparently it can handle https requests and
> > reverse proxy them as http requests.
>
> That's a nice idea but frankly I got fed up with IIS after I
> discovered I couldn't easily get your Dolphin FastCGI stuff working
> on it (I forget why now). Also, quite a few of the pages are run
> through a sort of template/macro expander and given the amount of
> traffic I think it's more fun just to run the lot through Swazoo.

Oh, and I now remember the other reason I was fed up with IIS.

When we were developing the various websites I wanted to be able to run
test versions on the local server box here at "OA Central". This is
running Windows XP (partly because much of the software for Win2K3 is
far too expensive) and unfortunately MS has knobbled WinXP so that it
can only run one web site under IIS.

Best regards,

--
Andy Bower
Dolphin Support
www.object-arts.com

Hi Andy,

I too back the idea that Seaside is interesting - I want to play with it
more but as mentioned Squeak is very tricky to use, and I am put off by supporting
Cincom as they seem to have different company values to those of mine (and
honestly I find Dolphin is much more fun and productive for me).

> 2) The current Seaside implementations available for Squeak or
> VisualWorks are not test-based. This means that it will be very
> difficult to ascertain whether any port is working correctly.

This does seem like something we could help out with - maybe I could hold
my nose long enough to get some relevent tests running such that there was
something that could seed a Dolphin port. There is a new UK based Smalltalk
group that seems to be into Squeak and Seaside, maybe we can leverage some
of there support (and seeing as they crashed the XtC meeting they do owe
something).

Seriously though - I would like to see Smalltalk get back into the medal
rounds - its well deserved, I'm fed up with the Ruby and Python excitement
of old ideas. Dolphin is something I can show those folks that really makes
them interested, it also inspires C# programmers too.

> 3) We did have an offer from Avi Bryant to look at making the port for
> a (reasonable) few thousand dollars. From the point of view of
> increased Dolphin sales, however, this was hard to justify so we
> decined (plus the fact there would be an ongoing maintenance expense
> too). My guess is that any version of Seaside running under Dolphin 6
> will be expected to run under the free Community Edition of Dolphin.
> This makes it harder to justify any large costs.

As Seaside is something that appears to be taking on Rails, and with their
recent "under the radar" awards, I think that Seaside running in the professional
version may well sell more copies of Dolphin. But the getting some tests
running seems like the most obvious first approach.

Tim

macta wrote:

> As Seaside is something that appears to be taking on Rails, and with their
> recent "under the radar" awards, I think that Seaside running in the professional
> version may well sell more copies of Dolphin. But the getting some tests
> running seems like the most obvious first approach.

For what it's worth, there are at least tests for Continuation
(ContinuationTest in the Seaside package - if someone wants a fileout
let me know), and the rest of the codebase is kept fairly portable at
least between Seaside and VW.

I should also point out this effort, not sure where it's at these days:
http://dolphinseaside.blogspot.com/

I'd personally love to see Seaside running on Dolphin, and am happy to
provide what guidance I can to anyone who's working on that... I'm just
too busy to justify donating the time for a port right now.

Avi

Avi Bryant escribió:
> macta wrote:
>> As Seaside is something that appears to be taking on Rails, and with their
>> recent "under the radar" awards, I think that Seaside running in the professional
>> version may well sell more copies of Dolphin. But the getting some tests
>> running seems like the most obvious first approach.

 > For what it's worth, there are at least tests for Continuation
 > (ContinuationTest in the Seaside package - if someone wants a fileout
 > let me know), and the rest of the codebase is kept fairly portable at
 > least between Seaside and VW.
 >

Yes, and all the tests passes. So does the AmbTests and few others,
not the same about WAStateRegistryTest, because of the weak
dictionary used to store the values.

> I should also point out this effort, not sure where it's at these days:
> http://dolphinseaside.blogspot.com/

It's stalled, but not canceled, I took it as a spare time/after
work/home project, but because I have extra work after hours, I
reserve the spare time to be that... spare time. :-)

However, I'm willing to start it again in one or two weeks.

> I'd personally love to see Seaside running on Dolphin, and am happy to
> provide what guidance I can to anyone who's working on that... I'm just
> too busy to justify donating the time for a port right now.

The port I've done, which is unfinished and hand-crafted, has some
problems, but estimating from what I've done, a complete port won't
take more than 1 month of work. Adding developers to a sustainable
number may reduce or improve the final work.

Fortunately many developers got in contact with me to offer their
help, so the "intention" exists, but I haven't been able to
coordinate anything by the reasons mentioned above.

If we set up a wiki somewhere to use as colaboration tool, plus a
mailing list or this newsgroup as communication medium, we can
arrange the enough developers to complete what is needed* in one or
two months.

By now I've updated the weblog at
http://dolphinseaside.blogspot.com, let's see how it follows...

Best regards,

--
Esteban

Avi,

> I'd personally love to see Seaside running on Dolphin, and am happy to
> provide what guidance I can to anyone who's working on that... I'm
> just too busy to justify donating the time for a port right now.

Does this mean that you'd no longer be able to take on the port on a
commercial basis as we discussed previously in e-mail. I've had an
e-mail pledge for a substantial amount and there have been a couple on
the newsgroup that would together match the $2500 you requested.

However, I'm sure everyone would quite understand if you were too busy
to take this on right now.

Best regards,

--
Andy Bower
Dolphin Support
www.object-arts.com

Esteban A. Maringolo schrieb:
I am one of those, who would like to help!

>
> If we set up a wiki somewhere to use as colaboration tool, plus a
> mailing list or this newsgroup as communication medium, we can arrange
> the enough developers to complete what is needed* in one or two months.
>

I could offer our companies account of basecamphq as a project
collaboration tool. There are messages, todolists, writeboards (kind of
wiki), milestones, files, ...

As a collaboration tool it's really neat to work with (done by
37signals.com, well, not with seaside, but still, with ruby on
rails...). For a feature list see www.basecamphq.com

Every person interested in contributing will get an account.

What do you think?

> By now I've updated the weblog at http://dolphinseaside.blogspot.com,
> let's see how it follows...

Your weblog should then remain the public communication chanel.


Greetings!

Andreas (Brodbeck)

Andy Bower wrote:

> Does this mean that you'd no longer be able to take on the port on a
> commercial basis as we discussed previously in e-mail. I've had an
> e-mail pledge for a substantial amount and there have been a couple on
> the newsgroup that would together match the $2500 you requested.

No, I'm still happy to stand by my offer (or rather, Smallthought is).
We keep a careful balance between open source work, product work, and
consulting work, but if I can bump it into the latter category we can
justify the time.

Let's work out the details by email.

Avi