Smalltalk web application development env from scratch?

Question

I am struggling to setup a Smalltalk web application env from scratch on Windows. These are the features I am looking for:

• Prefer Squeak or a free ST env. Must work stably on windows
• Seaside is preferred as the framework of choice
• MySQL or SQLite as the db
• decent HTML templating or front end technology ala CL-WHO

I really like the language but I am having a hard time finding a detailed tutorial for noobs to get started with web app dev on Smalltalk. Both Django and Rails have done a lot of good work in this regard...Even the Lispers have some good noob tutorials.

Answer 1

Try following the tutorial of Aida/Web framework to make first steps. About persistence, I would simply skip relational databases for a while, because Squeak image alone can be used as a database.

About templating, Smalltalk web frameworks skipped templates and prefer the web programming out of reusable components. That way you are programming only in Smalltalk all the time and don't see the HTML at all. Styling is on the other side done with CSS, which is nicely separated from web code.

Answer 2

I would also don't play around with an RDBMS if it isn't needed to to the existing environment or the integration of external systems. A very good and powerful environment is GLASS which is free for non-commercial apps. GLASS stands for Gemstone/S, Linux, Apache, Squeak, and Seaside. Currently the team is also using Pharo, a very promising spin-off of Squeak.

The power of Gemstone is the fact, that it's not only an ODBMS - no paradigm break, no mapping between objects and tables. It's also the VM where the application is running, so there's no needless distribution between the system where Seaside is running to generate and handle the front-end and the backend running the application logic. That's very powerful. Additionally Gemstone is not only restricted to one core. But then you've got to pay. The maximum DB size are 8192 TB. g

For a quick start there's a VMware virtual appliance.

mue