Newbie Questions

Hello,

I am quite new to squeak and the whole smalltalk world. Without seaside, I
would never have looked at smalltalk ... I am very happy I did :-)

However, after playing around for two days and reading and watching everything
I could find on the net (thanks to Ramon for blogging about his
experiences .. his writings and screencasts are very useful to me!) there are
still some questions.

First of all, since I am particulary interested in seaside and web
development: Is there a nice docu about how to deploy an image to a server? I
assume this needs to be some kind of headless image - and then .. how to make
updates without shutting down the image? Has anyone already "standardized"
this procedures (and wrote them down;) ?

Next thing I do not understand completely is this oodb thing. I never did
anything with oodb and I could not find much information about Magma /
GOODS / .... - question is: are there good tutorials and which of this
solutions are stable and useable? I tried to install magma but after
telnetting to its port and feeding some random chars it crashed my whole
squeak ....

Also I do not completely understand all these images. The "standard" squeak
image seems a bit colorful and I am not sure its the right one for developing
with all these graphics, painting toys and objects around which I do not
understand (yet) :-) I am using squeak-dev-beta-118W now, but there are much
playing toys around as well.

What I was not able to find is information about tweaking the environment, how
to edit the menu items, etc.

Any pointer to information is appreciated .. its quite hard to find a way
through all the broken links, but I am very enthusiastic about the whole
smalltalk world .. and I would love to learn more about it.

Regards,
        Piero
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2007/5/2, Piero Sartini <[hidden email]>:
It sounds scary at first but many Seaside production applications use
a "headed" Squeak Image. Either with a VNC server on the server or use
the built in VNC server in Squeak. How you deploy code kinda depends
on your setup (how often you do how many deployments). Many people
just load in new code via Monticello, either with the Morphic Browser
in the image or the web based version uploader. There are no publicly
available solutions for automatically deploying code but it can be
implemented quite easily and has been done at least in two places.

Yeah, it's suboptimal but it works. Seaside 2.8 will run on the
KernelImage that includes none of the graphics and toys.

> I am using squeak-dev-beta-118W now, but there are much
> playing toys around as well.


The dev images by Damien are standard Squeak Images with a lot of
packages that are helpful for development loaded in. You can base a
production application on them or you can use a standard Squeak Image
and load all the packages in that you need for production. Depends on
your taste.

Cheers
Philippe
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On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 21:28 +0200, Piero Sartini wrote: Yes, this is very valuable source. And Ramon is very helpful guy ;)

> First of all, since I am particulary interested in seaside and web
> development: Is there a nice docu about how to deploy an image to a server? I
> assume this needs to be some kind of headless image - and then .. how to make
> updates without shutting down the image? Has anyone already "standardized"
> this procedures (and wrote them down;) ?
>
You shouldn't care too much about deployment in the beginning. You can
use your development image and just start it headless on any server to
do its service. Later on you will divide the image you develop on and
the image you deploy. You will add more tools which help you develop
and you will reduce the install base for your web app. For development
the answer could be the squeak-dev image. For the deployment the answer
is propably kernelimage which has everything stripped which you don't
need for a server app.
I'm myself in the progress of creating a deployment script. I have a
manually created base image (started from the official 3.9 image). And
I have a script which loads the latest code, closes windows, frees
some memory and creates a derivate image which is able to deploy.
 
> Next thing I do not understand completely is this oodb thing. I never did
> anything with oodb and I could not find much information about Magma /
> GOODS / .... - question is: are there good tutorials and which of this
> solutions are stable and useable? I tried to install magma but after
> telnetting to its port and feeding some random chars it crashed my whole
> squeak ....
>
You shouldn't just telnetting. It is still a oodb ;) Getting into OODBs
is quite easy as the reflect exactly what you model with your
programming. You just need to connect and request the top most entry in
the database (it is just a tree).

http://www.shaffer-consulting.com/david/Seaside/SeasideAndGOODS/index.html

might be helpful for using GOODS with seaside.

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2665

gives the information about Magma you need. As long as you are not about
performance tuning the learning curve isn't very steep. Magma has its
one Mailing List you should subscribe to if you like to use it. Chris is
also a very helpful guy (as nearly everybody in the smalltalk community
;) )
> Also I do not completely understand all these images. The "standard" squeak
> image seems a bit colorful and I am not sure its the right one for developing
> with all these graphics, painting toys and objects around which I do not
> understand (yet) :-) I am using squeak-dev-beta-118W now, but there are much
> playing toys around as well.
>
The most important thing is the version number. 3.9 is the actual number
3.10 is in development. Which one to use you have to decide which tools
you want to use. I think most stuff is running on 3.8 image with moving
towards 3.9.
The flavours of images are for special purposes:
- squeak-dev : stuffed with goodies to ease development
- SMP : preinstalled modules to use the pier wiki with several
  persistence capabilities
- squeak official image
- kernelimage: A Image with only the necessary stuff to run installed
- minimalmorphic: a kernelimage with a base version of the graphical
  engine
- ...
Take your time. You'll get into this automatically if you read this
list and maybe the newbies and squeak-dev list.


> Any pointer to information is appreciated .. its quite hard to find a way
> through all the broken links, but I am very enthusiastic about the whole
> smalltalk world .. and I would love to learn more about it.
>
You are welcome :)

Norbert

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2007/5/2, Piero Sartini <[hidden email]>:
> understand (yet) :-) I am using squeak-dev-beta-118W now, but there are much
> playing toys around as well.

This image is highly experimental. You may prefer to use a
squeak-dev-beta-116 which is based on Squeak 3.10-alpha or
squeak-dev-118 which is based on the stable 3.9. I use
squeak-dev-beta-116 and it's stable.

As you use Seaside, I would even advise you to use squeak-web which is
like squeak-dev, but for Seaside developers.

http://damien.cassou.free.fr/squeak-web/

There are 2 images: squeak-web and squeak-web-beta. Differences are
the same as for squeak-dev.

Bye

--
Damien Cassou
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Thank you all for the answers so far!

> You shouldn't care too much about deployment in the beginning.

You are right, I should have something to deploy before thinking about how to
do so ;-)

Its just that I am (still^^) developing in java and its confusing not to
have application servers, deployment descriptors and all this stuff around ..
everything is just that straight ... i guess its best to forget about all
these java problems when doing smalltalk.

> You shouldn't just telnetting. It is still a oodb ;)

Yes - just wanted to see if it started up ... and was a bit shocked that it
crashed that easy .. but this may not be the list for such issues.

> Chris is
> also a very helpful guy (as nearly everybody in the smalltalk community
> ;) )

Yes, as far as I can say smalltalk people are indeed very nice :-)


        Piero
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