Re: Anyone here switched to Ruby

I've not used Rails or Seaside, so my comments may be irrelevant - but
that's never stopped me before :-).

"Yanni Chiu" <yanni-REMOVETHIS@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:O-ydnU6USZj-bdHZnZ2dnUVZ_s6dnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Is there a "Smalltalk on Rails" like web framework?"

I think the answer is that there is no "Smalltalk on Rails"
currently available as open source. I'd like there to be,
and I'm working toward it. It wouldn't be a one-to-one
mapping since it would be Smalltalk/Seaside. One main difference
is that Rails is template based, and Seaside isn't (templates
can be done, but Seaside's rendering machinery is a better fit).

So I'm interested to know what is expected of such a framework.
- is multiple RDB support important (i.e. other than Postgres)

Yes. You often don't have the chance to add a new DBMS to a server.
Whilst adding a Smalltalk image as a service presumes some level of
control over the server, and indeed I have full control, I'd still
rather have as few different DBMSs running there as possible.

- is an out-of-the-box dev/test/prod setup important

I've had good success using VW's runtime.im and building up with
packages saved as parcels. This allows a normal Smalltalk development
setup, and easy transfer to a production environment (no stripping and
moving images, update production components individually, perform
updates via file transfer and VW's /configure web app). If you want to
support lots of different platforms and web servers I can see
deployment being a lot of work, so at the start you're probably best
just doing say Apache, and pointing people to the VW Web Toolkit docs
for others.

- is sequence-based primary keys sufficient or is a more full
featured OR-mapping needed
- tutorials and suggested development/deployment recipes
(i.e. generated SUnit testcases where appropriate,
howto's and naming conventions for source code control, etc.)
- how much configurability of the basic CRUD widgets
- relationship navigation: would 1-1 and 1-M suffice, or would
handling M-M be important

Am I setting the bar too high or too low? Any description
of what people think a Rails-thing would do for them would
be welcome.

I used VW Web Toolkit servlets to write a web app for our product's
license keys that had its own MS SQLServer database, and integrated it
with a cryptography DLL, MS Exchange email used via COM, an existing
ASP web app and its Access database. The persistent objects were
designed to be RDB-friendly, so the OR-mapping was an unsurprising
Smalltalk meta-layer mapping instance variables to columns. The
object-to-HTML mapping was also unsurprising, again a little
meta-layer specifying which instance variables to show for which view.
I guess everyone reinvents these particular wheels the first time they
come to them, since they're not particularly tricky.

The hard parts, where I might have benefited from an existing
framework:

- processing POST requests:
All the sanity checking of values, app-specific checking and
pre-processing. The code got big quickly, with the main problem being
that it seemed hard to know what the user was doing until all the
arguments were processed, but the way to process the arguments
depended on what the user was doing. A UI that would have been able to
tell me up front what the user was doing would have been horrible for
the user. (The basic UI was an object per row in an HTML table, with
several possible operations for the object depending on its internal
state. We needed to support a single UI operation that affected
multiple rows.)

- deployment and testing:
It took a while to find an acceptable system for moving from
development on a local PC, to testing on the server, to production. A
sizeable part of this was problems in VW that have since been
corrected, so maybe things would be better now.

HTH, and good luck!
Steve


.

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