[Glass] Develop Gemstone web server app in VW but deploy in Pharo?

[Dale Henrichs]

Frank,

I'll stay away from the business issues and just focus on the technical:)

I would say that the biggest technical challenge for porting your
application to Pharo/GemStone lies in what VW libraries/features you are
using.

The GLASS/Web Edition version of GemStone has been focused on Pharo
compatibility, so there is a fairly complete compatibility layer that
smooths the road for porting applications from Pharo to GemStone.

There is no similar VW compatibility layer, so you you would probably need
to either create such a layer for yourselves (or change your code base to
adapt to GemStone). Over the years I would say there has a been a fair
amount of work where GemStone application code has been written in such a
way that it can be run in VW or GemStone, but not a lot of effort has gone
into making it easy to execute VW code in GemStone...

If you are using Seaside, then there is a port of Seaside for GemStone and
that will make your life a bit easier.

The second area of challenge will be in adapting the transaction model that
you are using with your RDBMS to a GemStone-based model. I think it is
fairly common when programming against an RDBMS that you make the
assumption that you can have multiple db sessions active at once ... In
GemStone, you can have multiple concurrent db sessions open at once, but
each of the separate sessions must be in a separate VM.

So, I think it is technically feasible, but at the end of the day the
magnitude of the challenge will depend upon how tightly married you are to
the VW class library and how easy it is to translate your RDBMS code to a
GemStone-based transaction model.

Dale


On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 9:44 AM, FrankB <kontakt at pressburgservices.com>wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am evaluating how to develop a new and very complex web server
> application
> for a potential mass-market using Gemstone.
>
> Most of the application code does already exist in VW5 (several man years)
> using a RDBMS for storage. This caused great performance problems and was
> the show killer.
>
> We are having a VW7 license and we consider using VW7 for development but
> we
> are not willing to accept Cincom's insane slavery-like licensing conditions
> where they profit from our revenues and confiscate about half of our
> profits. That is worse than the tax office / IRS.
>
> Moving all our development tools to Pharo would require far too much work
> and delay.
>
> This is why the idea came up to use VW7 with Gemstone purely for
> development
> and Pharo with Gemstone for deployment.
>
> What is your opinion?
> Is that feasible?
> Can the porting process of the app code be made (almost) automatic?
> Has it been done?
>
> Thank you very much for any comment.
>
> Regards
> FrankB
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://forum.world.st/Develop-Gemstone-web-server-app-in-VW-but-deploy-in-Pharo-tp4756527.html
> Sent from the GLASS mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
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