[Glass] GsDevKit Server Blocks for Thin Client appications ... pre-announcement

[Dale Henrichs via Glass]

On 04/21/2015 08:57 AM, Mariano Martinez Peck wrote:
> Hi Dale,
>
> This is very interesting!!! Not exactly right now, BUT at some point 
> in the future, i was thinking an scenario where this could really be 
> of help. Basically, I have some jobs that would take hours/days to run 
> (for example neural networks implementations for backtesting and 
> automated trading). And these jobs may not read/write much of the data 
> in GemStone. So what I thought is to fire up several Pharo images to 
> split the work and to avoid collapsing the stone that will be used for 
> other things as well.
Yes this type of "light weight" stone access is one of the things that 
server blocks are good for ... you can login and logout on demand so 
there is no need to keep sessions alive for long periods of time ...
> With that strategy in mind, I needed to somehow resolve the read/write 
> of the little data I need (either REST + json or whatever). But this 
> server blocks idea may be exactly what I need.
Yep ... I think the best model is to keep things simple (thus the 
emphasis on thin client) ... but the built-in STON access and the 
ability to execute arbitrary Smalltalk on the server makes server blocks 
superior to a restful interface ... Obviously for external use REST is 
the right thing but for trusted clients it's really a good way to go ...
>
> I hope I have the chance in the future to try this out.
Drop me a line before trying in case the api or dev instructions change[1].

[1] 
https://github.com/GsDevKit/gsDevKitHome/blob/dev/projects/roassal/devBootstrap.md#roassal-visualization-setup-and-install
>
> Thanks a lot, very interesting.  I have some other ideas in 
> mind...like consuming a no-sql or sql db from pharo and push data into 
> gemstone (otherwise you would need to find another way). Anyway...lots 
> of ideas come to my mind where this could be useful.
>
That's what is nice about server Blocks ... they provide a low-level and 
simple interface to GemStone upon which interesting capabilities can be 
built ...

Dale