[Glass] How to start an eval of Gemsatone/S

Tue Jan 18 08:40:22 PST 2022

Martin:

Thanks, 

What I meant about WSL was whether there were some technical reasons I couldn’t run Gemstone “well” under it i.e. I’m talking about doing POCs.

I don’t have a dedicated Linux box i.e. from a development / POC perspective so my choices are to use VmWare Workstation or WSL . 

I could have my admin spawn a VmWare Ubuntu instance but that would be running thru a VPN, I could do Linode also , yet WSL would be super convenient.

In short it would be a better utilization of my specific resources. 

I understand the limitations of the free licenses, however , I must say that I’m quite pleased at GemTalk for their licensing policy which unlike some other ST vendors I do find is one that is very reasonable and promotes exploration and even supports a fledgling startup get its feet planted into solid ground.

So I tilt my hat to Gemtalk management for that 😊

Charles A. Monteiro
Chief Technology Officer
Datasoft, Inc

Phone: 347-853-7349

Web:tradeblazer.com <http://www.tradeblazer.com> 

From: Marten Feldtmann <m at feldtmann.online> 
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2022 10:49 AM
To: charles at tradeblazer.com; Charles Monteiro via Glass <glass at lists.gemtalksystems.com>
Subject: Re: [Glass] How to start an eval of Gemsatone/S

Charles Monteiro via Glass <glass at lists.gemtalksystems.com <mailto:glass at lists.gemtalksystems.com> > hat am 18.01.2022 16:03 geschrieben: 

Hi all,

Not sure if this is the right spot to ask,let me know if not, this is more of sales evaluation i.e. that’s the intent.

Context:

I wish to evaluate Gemstone/S at first for some more tangential needs that are currently targeted for Mongo.

Our core product actually runs over Oracle and soon over any RDMS but for practical purposes we are targetting Postgres.

However, potentially the bigger need.

>From my FPL and Brooklyn Union Gas days I became quite familiar with using GemBuilder for VW however instead I want to engage Gemstone from Pharo and I understand that not to work the same way.

Recently , (yesterday) I discovered Sparkle which led me to discovering SparkleFFI , so there’s apparently some efforts under way to provide comm from Pharo to Gemstone i.e. more akin to Gembuilder/VW.

Anyhow, to cut to the chase.

Objectives:

I’m not interested in building a Seaside app that uses Gemstone for its persistence.

Rather, very thin , quite dumb Svelte/JS UIs will talk to Pharo microservice(s) which in turn will talk to Gemstone i.e. that’s the hope.

I would prefer some rpc mechanism where transaction boundaries are controlled from Pharo but I”ll be happy with whatever mechanism I can use to pass objects to Gemstone.

So:

1.	How do I talk to Gemstone from Pharo ?

a.	I believe that Zinc can actually run on Gemstone so json/http(s) would be one way ? Any other way ? best way ?

We only use REST-like APIs ... 

2.	Is there a notification / push mechanism now in place e.g. change to a Gemstone collection could be notified to interested parties (Pharo)

a.	Is there a web socket implementation?
b.	Any other messaging implementation ? MQTT ? RabbitMQ etc ?

I actually asked this also some days ago, but I assume - none. We used in our product a Gemstone/S to ZMQ bridge and then a Python written ZMQ to WebSocket server - this is very stable running with lots of users - but one always has to consider license restrictions, I do as much as I can do to put work from the pure Gemstone/S server to other languages (and other processes not running on the Gemstone cores). 

3.	GemConnect / Postgres , would there be a separate additional license fee ?

With Gemstone/S 3.6.3 there is a free PostgreSQL Connector available ...  its on my list to use for our product. 

4.	Has the performance of markForCollection changed much in all of these years i.e. does one have to allocate downtime ? i.e. what if the app actually needed to run 24x7, what are the accommodations for said scenario under current Gemstone/S.

This depends on your hardware, on your database size ... but a downtime is normally not needed. 

5.	I assume that for development use that one can install Gemstone under WSL ? If so any issues to be aware of ?

You can get a free version - but this had lots of limitations, in terms of database size, number of concurrently  processes to connect to the stone. You may get a database license by registering at GemtalkSystems. To say it with the Beatles: Limitations "here, there and everywhere". Thats the traditional license. 

You can even get a GemBuilder license ... 

6.	Sparkle is the new IDE ? but I see there’s also IoDE ?

And Jade ... a more traditional Smalltalk IDE. 

Finally , given all of the above , and never mind Gemstone/ S setup itself , is there some doc that illustrates a simple hello world scenario where a Pharo image is sending to Gemstone objects for persistence ?

A cursory review of the Glass posts seem Seaside centric.

Thanks in advance,

Charles A. Monteiro
Chief Technology Officer
Datasoft, Inc

Phone: 347-853-7349

Web:tradeblazer.com <http://www.tradeblazer.com> 

_______________________________________________ Glass mailing list Glass at lists.gemtalksystems.com <mailto:Glass at lists.gemtalksystems.com>  https://lists.gemtalksystems.com/mailman/listinfo/glass 

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