[Seaside] Glorp/Seaside experience exchange on- or offline, anybody?

Hi there,

since nobody at ESUG seemed to be interested in a Glorp/Seaside BOF as I suggested, I try something new now ;-)

Glorp is a great tool for OR mapping and works very well. There is good introductory material, even if it is hard to find. But when it comes to real world use, there are many questions to be answered like

• how to handle transactions, mementos, units of work and that stuff, especially in a multi-user environment like a Seaside based web app
  
• how to map more complicated things, like polymorphic joins, embedded objects etc.
• what if an image slows down gradually when a user has been working for hours, almsot coming to a standstill. How to find out if Glorp or your use of it is the problem? What can you do then?
• Is my use of transactions correct or will I face problems

None of these are easy questions and maybe there are many possible answers to them, But finding them on your own can be hard and take a lot of time. It can even be a risk to your business.

There is the Glorp group, but it's not actually in heavy use and sometimes it is hard to write down a problem in a few lines. Explaining the whole thing sometimes would make for loooong messages that probably nobody ever reads, esp. if the poster's english isn't brilliant.

So what I'm looking for is ways to find and meet people who also use Glorp (or any other ORM in Smalltalk) and would be interested in discussing stuff and maybe answer questions. Something like a Glorp users group.

The best thing to exchange ideas is probably to meet face to face and carry your laptop with you. So if anybody in Southern Germany, Eastern France, Northern Switzerland would be interested in such a meeting, please let me know and I am more than interested in setting something up.

The second best is probably some sort of online conference call. Maybe even on a regular basis.

Please let me know if you'd be interested.

Joachim

I've been working for a long time on an app that uses TOPLink, which is a distant relative to Glorp, and I've also used Glorp in smaller private projects, so I'd be a natural fit for such a group.
However, don't expect too much problem-solving from any such get-together. My experience is that for example doing elaborate mapping tricks or performance analysis requires in-depth knowledge both of the ORM framework and of the application in question. Someone from outside may add interesting new viewpoints but will rarely provide the key point in solving a problem, because they can't really invest that much time into other people's problems :-)
Meeting over some beer would be fun anyway, but southern Germany is too far away for me, and I find online conference calls a pretty stressful and often not very productive way to share information. A well-frequented online forum (where knowledgeable folks read often and write meaningful responses) is something that's very hard to beat in my opinion. However, as a forum becomes somewhat deserted, it loses its value very quickly, so I do see the problem with that kind of exchange.

Still, count me in as interested, but don't set your hopes too high :-)

Hans-Martin

Hans-Martin,

I agree that communicating a problem alone can take long and providing a simple testcase is sometimes close to impossible.

This only makes it a lot harder to reach anybody using posts on a discussion group, for example. You'd have to write extremely long posts which are very likely to simple die from starvation because nobody reads them. That's what's so frustrating about Glorp ;-) Add to that the increased complexity when you work in a web context where - unlike in a fat client - you need to think of more layers of concurrency and synchronization - or separation.

I think I also have quite some experience with Glorp and am fascinated by how well it works for even complex things. But then there are cases that are really hard. Or they really aren't but in my head they look harder than they are ;-)


I share your scepticism about online meetings or chat for such things. I see now alternative, other than sitting alone in my cubicle and trying to find all the hard things on my own... ;-)


Joachim







Am Donnerstag, 28. September 2017 17:03:49 UTC+2 schrieb Hans-Martin Mosner:

I've been working for a long time on an app that uses TOPLink, which is a distant relative to Glorp, and I've also used Glorp in smaller private projects, so I'd be a natural fit for such a group.
However, don't expect too much problem-solving from any such get-together. My experience is that for example doing elaborate mapping tricks or performance analysis requires in-depth knowledge both of the ORM framework and of the application in question. Someone from outside may add interesting new viewpoints but will rarely provide the key point in solving a problem, because they can't really invest that much time into other people's problems :-)
Meeting over some beer would be fun anyway, but southern Germany is too far away for me, and I find online conference calls a pretty stressful and often not very productive way to share information. A well-frequented online forum (where knowledgeable folks read often and write meaningful responses) is something that's very hard to beat in my opinion. However, as a forum becomes somewhat deserted, it loses its value very quickly, so I do see the problem with that kind of exchange.

Still, count me in as interested, but don't set your hopes too high :-)

Hans-Martin