[Glass] Silly question: what is "GLASS"?

[Richard Sargent via Glass]

It's not a silly question. The answer has been in flux almost from the
beginning. 

GLASS originally was an appliance, a complete ready to use VM. The process
for creating the VM was manual and very labour intensive. Consequently, the
GLASS appliance was stale almost from the beginning.

Over the last several years, Dale has been working to change the situation
and make all these other tools - like seaside - work with GemStone simply
and easily. The expectation was that one would always update their installed
appliance with (perhaps) the latest versions of everything, including
GemStone/S itself.

And of course, some people didn't want to use the appliance, especially as
it fell further and further behind the times. So they've been working with
the software, but not the appliance.

Relatively recently, Dale created GLASS1, as a stepping stone along the way
to the end game. We're not there yet, but getting closer.

GsUpdater came along partly because Metacello cannot readily update itself
while running to load newer versions of things. It also accommodates the
many different versions of the GemStone/S server product supporting "GLASS"
- from 2.x onward. Just loading packages isn't enough.

Very recently, Dale's brought out GsDevKit which is a set of stepping stones
on that path mentioned above. I *think* when GsDevKit is complete, we will
be at that endgame where everyone can readily and easily use GemStone and
all the other tools that go into making a good web application. That endgame
is very close now!


[I'm sure Dale can fill in many holes in the above. But the summary is "work
in progress, transitional elements, nearly finished".]




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