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Pharo as a platform for a large E-Commerce website

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Sanjay Minni

Pharo as a platform for a large E-Commerce website

Hi,

One of my friends is moving forward on a very serious e-commerce portal (startup).
Just as an example / illustration - something like say any of the typical largest online shopping stores

Initial estimates are typically
average peak
#no of records to search 100,000 500,000
#no of users online 1,000 5,000
#no of transactions per hour 10,000 50,000
#no of actual commerce
gateway transaction per hour 1,000 5,000

Possibly the above details are sketchy but the immediate questions for him to firm up investment plans are:
- Will a Pharo based platform be appropriate
-- Technology ?
-- Robustness & support ?
- what will be the team man year effort (ballpark estimate) for development, testing, administration upto initial go-live ?

Could folks just throw any pointers to help in investment estimation and evaluation

Are any references of similar projects available in Pharo at this time ?

regards
Sanjay

cheers,
Sanjay

Stephan Eggermont-3

Re: Pharo as a platform for a large E-Commerce website

Sanjay wrote:
>Possibly the above details are sketchy but the immediate questions for him
>to firm up investment plans are:
>- Will a Pharo based platform be appropriate
> -- Technology ?
> -- Robustness & support ?

Nothing you indicated in your estimates would be a bad fit for Pharo.
Strong points for Pharo in a startup context are flexibility and very
fast development.
Not being 64-bit is a weak point, but you might be able to come up
with a shared nothing architecture and lots of images running part
of the problem.

Do a spike integrating and deploying the technologies you need,
and make sure you can do that again after each commit.

>- what will be the team man year effort (ballpark estimate) for development,
>testing, administration upto initial go-live ?

1, 10 or 10000. Portal is a semantics-free marketing term.
Estimation at this level of fuzziness is a meaningless activity.
What do you plan to have online at the end of the first week, the
first month and the first quarter (at less and less detailed level)?
Do you already have these users, or do you need to grow the number
from zero?

Create a story map and slice it.
http://www.agileproductdesign.com/blog/the_new_backlog.html

Stephan

Cameron Sanders

Re: Pharo as a platform for a large E-Commerce website

Are you definitely going the smalltalk path and your question is Which One platform? Or are you not yet committed to smalltalk?

If you go with Pharo, you may be able to migrate to something like Gemstone should the need arise. Or to one of the other flavors.

I recently interviewed a kid with CompSci degree from a small school here in the States. He showed me his Senior Project. And I was nearly floored in shock. It was a whole mess of PHP... that did nothing more than present three DB tables to the user, which they could edit. In Pharo, using Seaside, and working through the tutorial to construct your login system (which was one of the tables of this project), and ... and using SQL calls directly (not learning Glorp), it would probably just take a few days to do as-you-learn. The amount of functional code/behavior seemed really small for a senior project... at least when compared to the productivity of Pharo+Seaside.

The moral of this story: if you are considering PHP as your alternative... DON'T! Instead work with classes/objects, in an environment that supports OO programming. Smalltalk scales really well in terms of programming time -- one of the most productive environments you will find.

That said... there are more java programmers than smalltalkers. ... of course... you need more java programmers for the same functionality! ;)

How many different dialogs/widgets presented to the User? How many unique attributes/fields for user to select? Navigation is standardized? Etc. Obviously, sizing a project takes time.

... In smalltalk, one can often lay out crude class definitions as fast as you can type them into a project management system. It was made for rapid prototyping, and the ('type') evolution that comes with such development.

I have a project that I would like to scale beyond your specs. But we can grow more slowly, giving us time to grapple with questions about DB mirroring, and how many Virtual images do we need, and how many Pharo images running on each... load balancing, etc. There are several people on this board who know more about this than I do. (Several offering consulting services too.)

Good luck!

-Cam

On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 7:25 AM, Stephan Eggermont <[hidden email]> wrote:

Sanjay wrote:
>Possibly the above details are sketchy but the immediate questions for him
>to firm up investment plans are:
>- Will a Pharo based platform be appropriate
> -- Technology ?
> -- Robustness & support ?

Nothing you indicated in your estimates would be a bad fit for Pharo.
Strong points for Pharo in a startup context are flexibility and very
fast development.
Not being 64-bit is a weak point, but you might be able to come up
with a shared nothing architecture and lots of images running part
of the problem.

Do a spike integrating and deploying the technologies you need,
and make sure you can do that again after each commit.

>- what will be the team man year effort (ballpark estimate) for development,
>testing, administration upto initial go-live ?

1, 10 or 10000. Portal is a semantics-free marketing term.
Estimation at this level of fuzziness is a meaningless activity.
What do you plan to have online at the end of the first week, the
first month and the first quarter (at less and less detailed level)?
Do you already have these users, or do you need to grow the number
from zero?

Create a story map and slice it.
http://www.agileproductdesign.com/blog/the_new_backlog.html

Stephan

EstebanLM

Re: Pharo as a platform for a large E-Commerce website

Hi,

sorry for the very delayed answer :)

Some years ago I made a massive ecommerce, it was developed on pharo and deployed on gemstone.

that works pretty well and you have infinite scaling.

now, you could do the same with pharo + some db backend (I'd recommend mongo) + a load balancing strategy.

this gives you some advantages (like not needing to deploy in a different platform) and some disadvantages (like have to doing the balancing stuff by your self).

but... certainly, nowadays there is nothing that could stop you to use pharo for your site.

cheers,

Esteban

On Aug 7, 2013, at 1:01 AM, Cameron Sanders <[hidden email]> wrote:

Are you definitely going the smalltalk path and your question is Which One platform? Or are you not yet committed to smalltalk?

If you go with Pharo, you may be able to migrate to something like Gemstone should the need arise. Or to one of the other flavors.

-

I recently interviewed a kid with CompSci degree from a small school here in the States. He showed me his Senior Project. And I was nearly floored in shock. It was a whole mess of PHP... that did nothing more than present three DB tables to the user, which they could edit. In Pharo, using Seaside, and working through the tutorial to construct your login system (which was one of the tables of this project), and ... and using SQL calls directly (not learning Glorp), it would probably just take a few days to do as-you-learn. The amount of functional code/behavior seemed really small for a senior project... at least when compared to the productivity of Pharo+Seaside.

The moral of this story: if you are considering PHP as your alternative... DON'T! Instead work with classes/objects, in an environment that supports OO programming. Smalltalk scales really well in terms of programming time -- one of the most productive environments you will find.

That said... there are more java programmers than smalltalkers. ... of course... you need more java programmers for the same functionality! ;)
-

How many different dialogs/widgets presented to the User? How many unique attributes/fields for user to select? Navigation is standardized? Etc. Obviously, sizing a project takes time.

... In smalltalk, one can often lay out crude class definitions as fast as you can type them into a project management system. It was made for rapid prototyping, and the ('type') evolution that comes with such development.

-

I have a project that I would like to scale beyond your specs. But we can grow more slowly, giving us time to grapple with questions about DB mirroring, and how many Virtual images do we need, and how many Pharo images running on each... load balancing, etc. There are several people on this board who know more about this than I do. (Several offering consulting services too.)

Good luck!

-Cam

On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 7:25 AM, Stephan Eggermont <[hidden email]> wrote:

Sanjay wrote:
>Possibly the above details are sketchy but the immediate questions for him
>to firm up investment plans are:
>- Will a Pharo based platform be appropriate
> -- Technology ?
> -- Robustness & support ?

Nothing you indicated in your estimates would be a bad fit for Pharo.
Strong points for Pharo in a startup context are flexibility and very
fast development.
Not being 64-bit is a weak point, but you might be able to come up
with a shared nothing architecture and lots of images running part
of the problem.

Do a spike integrating and deploying the technologies you need,
and make sure you can do that again after each commit.

>- what will be the team man year effort (ballpark estimate) for development,
>testing, administration upto initial go-live ?

1, 10 or 10000. Portal is a semantics-free marketing term.
Estimation at this level of fuzziness is a meaningless activity.
What do you plan to have online at the end of the first week, the
first month and the first quarter (at less and less detailed level)?
Do you already have these users, or do you need to grow the number
from zero?

Create a story map and slice it.
http://www.agileproductdesign.com/blog/the_new_backlog.html

Stephan

S Krish

Re: Pharo as a platform for a large E-Commerce website

In reply to this post by Sanjay Minni

Let me start with this note:

"Asking a Pharo Group what fits best for a good commercial solution is like asking an hungry person whether he would like to go for a feast.."

Most certainly the answer should be a resounding yes from this group. You should.

Now if you are asking if there are alternatives: They abound from all sorts of frameworks for websites, shopping carts, ecommerce stuff extending even to the Apache Ofbiz freeware to the paid, Oracle, MS wares. What is a best fit entirely depends on your inclination and willingness to plumb the depths. RubyOnRails, Grails .. umpteen others have frameworks, plugin modules galore to work with. Pharo - Seaside offers a very different proposition, ease of development, debugging and building incrementally.

If you use Oracle, MS , IBM or likes, blame them when things go wrong and carry on. With Pharo you will have to pull up the sleeves, ask for help in this forum that I am sure will be forthcoming to some extent free and lots more if you can pay.

Having said this: When I had my say on this 4 years back in one of the major Conglomerate in India, I proposed Apache OfBiz, which after basic prototyping the whole project was shelved due to lack of understanding in the group, of directions to take, I believe there is nothing like having a plan of action that mixes n matches Pharo with Apache Ofbiz that you can later throw away once you are fully built up in Pharo. For scalability and future Gemstone is a good fit, but that may take quite a while. Pharo will scale well if you can follow a clean architecture plan.

The added glory is you can be the author / owner of the Pharo - Ofbiz bridge too.. ! Bit of XML RPC tricks should help and take help of Groovy on the Ofbiz side, you will feel Java malleable enough like it ought to be.

On Sat, Aug 3, 2013 at 8:08 AM, sminni <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi,

One of my friends is moving forward on a very serious e-commerce portal
(startup).
Just as an example / illustration - something like say any of the typical
largest online shopping stores

Initial estimates are typically
average peak
#no of records to search 100,000 500,000
#no of users online 1,000 5,000
#no of transactions per hour 10,000 50,000
#no of actual commerce
gateway transaction per hour 1,000 5,000

Possibly the above details are sketchy but the immediate questions for him
to firm up investment plans are:
- Will a Pharo based platform be appropriate
-- Technology ?
-- Robustness & support ?
- what will be the team man year effort (ballpark estimate) for development,
testing, administration upto initial go-live ?

Could folks just throw any pointers to help in investment estimation and
evaluation

Are any references of similar projects available in Pharo at this time ?

regards
Sanjay

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Regards, Sanjay
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