> Gosh - this is proving much more interesting than I had imagined, and I’m getting lots of useful input, so I double appreciate the time and thoughts from everyone.
>
> I probably should have said that my "super awesome idea" is just a little flashcard spelling app for my daughter (and possibly a few friends in her class) - so probably SimplePersistance will do in this case, however the comments about making a persistence decision at the right moment are super interesting - and as always, its about spotting the right moment to do that… and ideally you have well factored code with ample tests that help you easily move from the idea, to something more scalable or robust… however, move too soon and you get bogged down with the details and you lose site of an MVP.
>
> It has been interesting hearing peoples thoughts on all of this… the turning tide on ORM’s, the potential sweet allure of a NoSql (but can you query it easily) - and then the overarching element of just setting this shit up (where hopefully Docker steps in to make that bit at least easy). I suppose this is where the Rails scaffolding was/is? such a jumpstart, you can get a full thing going quite easily, and deploying seems relatively easy too… for us in Smalltalk land, its still a bit too much work for my liking, compared to the ease of getting an image and coding, and seeing it all work. It does seem to be getting marginally better at least, but I do wish there was super easy setup with all the pieces nicely in place so it was just your idea that you could focus on…
>
> Anyway, that login screen… oh crap I have to write one of those…
>
> Tim
>
>> On 6 Oct 2020, at 20:56, [hidden email] wrote:
>>
>> Sean,
>>
>> thanks for your short overview of what SimplePersistence does. Sounds useful for quite a few scenarios and might even carry you well through production stages for some projects.
>> What I was talking about is also not meant to frustrate people. I've only played with Mongo/Voyage for a few hours and I must say I was blown away by the speed and ease of that stack. We got something running in a few hours and it was impressive. So Mongo/Voyage is a cool thing to use.
>>
>> I always wanted to use Magna on Pharo. I even started to implement my own little clone of Magna in VA Smalltalk. I got into troubles when I tried to nest transactions and get this concurrency stuff streamlined somehow. We all know that besides naming and one-off problems, caching and concurreny are the hardest problems in computing. I think there is something about this. And so I gave up on that project... ;-)
>>
>> In the end I went with Glorp and DB2 (soon PostgreSQL). So far I am in a very solid state somewhere between complete despair and freaking out about how cool things are. I love and hate that stack from the bottom of my heart.
>>
>> The cool thing about an RDB is (and will sure be for quite a while) three letters. S, Q and L. There are lots of highly sophisticated GUI tools to query, manage, correct your data. And you can simply do everything form a command prompt, in an ssh session from your smartphone in a hotel toilet on the other side of the planet.
>>
>> Sure, using pure Smalltalk objects and not worry about n:m relationships, not having to write mappings and not having to end up with an object model that is driven mostly by what your O/R mapper can handle, sound great. And it is. Until you realize you also need to think about query optimizations, reorganizations, indexes and whatnot in an object database. There are also compromises to make.
>>
>> But, hey, I said all of that before.
>>
>> So maybe approaches like fuel, SimplePersistence (or BOSS or Object Swapper) are the best thing to start with when you need to find out about your architectural and business ideas first (am I building the right thing, will this feel good to a user, etc.), but once you are beyond that state, you better dive into your options and decide soon. Maybe using image saving or SimplePersistence is even good for production in your case. It was good enough for dabbleDB for quite a while, iirc, so why shouldn't it work for others? And maybe that is even the best you can do to postpone the decision for as long as possible at minimum opportunity cost.
>>
>> I didn't dig deep enough into Voyage/Mongo to judge how expensive or risky the changes to the design are. How hard is it to restructure the root trees - say you need something that is now beneath some root to be a root of its own? How would you do such changes?
>>
>> I know I can do a lot of things of that kind with SQL. It is a second looking glass and set of tools to view and manipulate the data. Sometimes things are easier to do in Smalltalk, sometimes it is way too slow on top of an ORM and a SQL query can do the same thing in a few milliseconds.
>>
>> But maybe I am asking the wrong questions fo Tim's purposes. I think I understand what you (Tim) are looking for is not a big, complex project but more like an experiment? I don't want to invalidate any of the given suggestions, I know or at least believe that they each do a good job. All I really wanted to warn you is that you will not easily be able to go from one option to another, because each will have a deep impact on your object model and application architecture.
>>
>> Joachim
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Am 06.10.20 um 16:34 schrieb Sean P. DeNigris via Pharo-users:
>>> jtuchel wrote
>>>> Sigh. Forget about the idea that it will be easy to switch your
>>>> persistence later....I am not commenting on SimplePersistence here, I
>>>> don't even know what it
>>>> does or doesn't.
>>> Joachim,
>>> Thanks for this interesting perspective. I've never had the (mis?!)fortune
>>> of a project growing enough to force me to make those tough choices! For
>>> SimplePersistence I will say that I view it as a way to *delay* making *any*
>>> choices until you are forced to. It's really just a layer of sugar on top of
>>> Fuel (it used to use the old school Squeak equivalent serialization
>>> mechanism - I forget the name and that might still work). You tell it what
>>> classes to serialize. Implement two methods for each class that get and set
>>> the data, and then it saves the whole thing as one object graph.
>>>
>>> Tim,
>>> If you use SimplePersistence, please keep me posted about your experience.
>>> I'm happy to help.
>>>
>>> NB I have maintained and extended the library, but it is the work of Ramon
>>> Leon
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -----
>>> Cheers,
>>> Sean
>>> --
>>> Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
>>>
>> --
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel          mailto:[hidden email]
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>>