Swazoo in 1 Paragraph

Just a shot at it...

Swazoo is a free web server and website framework written entirely in
Smalltalk.  It aims for HTTP/1.1 compliance and runs under several
Smalltalk dialects.  Using a composite resolution pattern, Swazoo makes
it possible to build sites that simultaneously use a variety of web
technologies (e.g. server-parsed "active" HTML, servelets, etc).  The
Swazoo development team hopes to create an entire web application
framework built on this foundation.

Related to that last line -- let's start some discussions about a web
application framework. Janko probably has the most experience with this,
so maybe we should start by asking him (please?) to explain how AIDA works.


Ken

Hi Ken, hi all,

Sorry, I'm late again ...

So, what's AIDA/Web in current state:

AIDA/Web is Web Application Server, that is, a web server with a
framework for doing web based applications in Smalltalk way.

Main idea back to 1996 was that we need a Smalltalk friendly way to
produce another user interface for our domain models besides GUI: a web
based presentation. But we didn't want to just put GUI like design on
the web, we wanted to explore a full potential of it. On the other side,
a strict separation of presentation from domain model was still a major
goal and we do that in MVC spirit.

So, goals behind AIDA/Web were/are in short:

- web presentation of domain model in MVC spirit
- full use of all web possibilities in web way, not GUI way
- easy web programming in pure Smalltalk without knowing HTML
- full use of web navigation (hypertext - url links), which is not
present in GUI world
- all usuall stuff like session control (cookies), security etc ...

During all those years using AIDA/Web in production I found basic idea
quite stable and usefull (no big changes in core AIDA for a while) and I
really like to merge, refactor, extend AIDA slowly into Swazoo and I see
CS4 an opportunity to start that.

Guys, help me explain AIDA more with your questions please :)

Cheers
Janko




Ken Treis wrote:

Janko Mivsek wrote:

> Sorry, I'm late again ...

Hey, you're talking to the guy who took about 3 months (or more) to get
code published in the Cincom StORE.  So you won't get any complaints
from me.  :)

Now that I've built a few sites using Swazoo, this is really intriguing
to me.  Maybe I ought to just grab the code and pour over it again.

[other good intro text snipped]

> - easy web programming in pure Smalltalk without knowing HTML

Is this by your use of HTML objects (e.g. a "Table" class), or do you
have something that's even higher-level than that?

> - full use of web navigation (hypertext - url links), which is not
> present in GUI world

I also think it's important to acknowledge that web interfaces are
fundamentally different from program GUIs.

> - all usuall stuff like session control (cookies), security etc ...

It seems to me like we could integrate this into Swazoo's composite
resource pattern pretty easily.

> During all those years using AIDA/Web in production I found basic idea
> quite stable and usefull (no big changes in core AIDA for a while) and
> I really like to merge, refactor, extend AIDA slowly into Swazoo and I
> see CS4 an opportunity to start that.

Cool deal.  Maybe you can describe some of the core AIDA objects (i.e.,
where should I start if I want to understand how AIDA works?), and then
I'll spend some time looking at AIDA and summarizing what I find for the
list.  This will be a good learning experience for me, and maybe others
could benefit from it as well.


Ken

Hi Janko,

> During all those years using AIDA/Web in production I found basic idea
> quite stable and usefull (no big changes in core AIDA for a while) and I
> really like to merge, refactor, extend AIDA slowly into Swazoo and I see
> CS4 an opportunity to start that.

Great!

> Guys, help me explain AIDA more with your questions please :)

I remember seeing an online presentation you did on AIDA a year or so ago.

Hi Steve

Steve Waring wrote:

>I remember seeing an online presentation you did on AIDA a year or so ago.
>>From memory it was part of a European Smalltalk conference. Do you have a
>link to this?
>
Yes, it was Southampton ESUG conference. You can find a presentation
here: http://www.esug.org/summerschools/2000_Southampton/aida/index.htm .

Home for AIDA/Web is at http://www.eranova.si/aida  (a bit old, i need
to *refactor* the page a bit :)

>
>Is http://www.eranova.si/ still AIDA's home? I have not been able to connect
>to it.
>
Hmm, it works for me, but M$ IIS is strange last days, need to migrate
to Swazoo ASAP :))
Would you try it again, please report if still not ok.

Cheers
Janko

Hi Janko,

> Yes, it was Southampton ESUG conference. You can find a presentation
> here: http://www.esug.org/summerschools/2000_Southampton/aida/index.htm .

Thanks!

> Would you try it again, please report if still not ok.

I am getting a 10061 connection refused socket error trying to connect to
port 80 at
www.eranova.si / 212.18.45.65

I'll email through a traceroute.

Thanks,
Steve
www.dolphinharbor.org

Steve, it should work now ...

Janko

Steve Waring wrote:

Hi Janko,

> Steve, it should work now ...

Fixed!

Thanks,
Steve
www.dolphinharbor.org

>
>
>> - easy web programming in pure Smalltalk without knowing HTML
>
>
> Is this by your use of HTML objects (e.g. a "Table" class), or do you
> have something that's even higher-level than that?

Yes, web components.

First, a HTML generation is done in two phases: first you make an object
representation of a page (hierarchy of web elements) and then this
object structure is streamed in HTML.

To build a WebPage, you compose it from WebElements like WebText,
WebImage, WebIputField etc. All those are subclasses of WebElement.
WebElement is actually a composite object, therefore it can contain
other WebElements. This is very handy because you can produce higher
level parts of a page, so called web components. And they can be reused
on other pages!

A glimpse on web elements hierarchy:

WebElement
    WebPage
        WebApplication
            YourApps
            ...
    WebText
        WebLink
        WebAnchor
    WebForm
    WebFormElement
        WebInputField
        WebTextArea
        WebButton
        WebCheckBox
           ....
    WebImage
    WebTable
    WebTableRow
    WebTableCell
    ....
   
And here is one simple method to produce a logon page:

logonPageFor: aSession

    | element |
    self clear.
    self    name: nil;    
        title: 'Logon'.

    element := WebElement new.
    element table width: 500.
    element cell
        addText: 'Username: '.
    element newCell
        add: (WebInputField new aspect: #username forObject: self).
    element newRow.
    element cell
        addText: 'Password:  '.
    element newCell
         add: (WebInputField new type: #password; aspect: #password
forObject: self).
    element newCell
        add: (WebButton new text: 'Logon').

    self add: element.

 
More questions please ;)

Janko