Hi,
I am real interested in seaside/magritte/pier and as a newbie (in squeak but
not in smalltalk) I would like to do a little Pier/seaside website. I
chose to run my squeak process in a linux server with a framebuffer X
server to administrate my image with VNC access (and not by the seaside
inspector available with halos). I did it with a special user (not root)
and my firewall connection configuration permits me to access externally
to my webserver on standard port 80.
But I am a bit unsecure with a deployment of a "classical" pier
configuration. If my machine crash, I lost all my data. So I need to do
backup. I can run a:
SmalltalkImage current snapshot: true andQuit: false.
but if a user does something on my website, it's rejected. So I read
somewhere (maybe thru this mailing-list archive) about a way to do
backup. Actually, I would like to save the image everytime it's
possible. I heard about the use of:
UnixProcess saveImageInBackgroundNicely but I don't know how to use it.
With forkHeadlessSqueakAndDoThenQuit message, it seems to be possible to
save my image in another until I do the permanent and tested weekly
backup. So if I crash or there is a glitch, my image or the periodically
save image can be broken but I can restore the most recent backup.
If someone can explain me how to do (or find how to do) this, I'll be
glad. I don't want to build a wiki/blog like site and lost in a crash
all the readers'comments/posts.
I also noticed some errors in the deployment of
squeakfoundation.org. By
clicking on 'Edit' or 'Login', there's error. But instead of
permitting
me to go back to the previous page with a short error message (and
advertising the webadmin) like on the other classic php/jsp website, I
go to debug message. It's really bad. I guess that when I click on
'Debug' I open a morph Debugger window on the squeak image. It's not
what I (and probably the
squeakfoundation.org webmaster) want. I am sure
there is a way to shortcut the doesNotUnderstand message in seaside/pier
so that in a deployment mode, the user has just a friendly error message
and the webmaster received an email from squeak with the debug message
infos and the context.
So I need your help to try to develop a website with seaside/pier
because I believe in those kind of way to develop websites (I like
servlets too but it's ugly, heavy and I prefer smalltalk as I used
smalltalk or ObjectiveC during the most important part of my life as a
programmer). I thought that I just can develop component and toggle the
deployment preference tag to true, to have a ready-to-use website but
there are missing things. As I said before:
+ how to save in one or two temporary images without stopping the
working pier site? and without going (as I do now) in config page (the
only place when I said 'deployment' to false) to toggle halos and then
to have an inspector which permits me to manually save (I know Lukas did
so too but it's not a good way). There's database way too for
persistence and I will probably look at Magma/REServe and something like
that. I think there are smalltalk that can save multiimage (visualworks
can do this I guess) and it could be a good option that squeak do that
too.
+ how to build a beautiful debug messages to a secure and friendly
deployment? The example of the
squeakfoundation.org website is a
horrible one. As with the 'Toggle Halos' button in the
oops-i-didnt-see-i-toogle-deployment-to-false case, it's dangerous and
every visitor can crash or browse in the image without getting the root
seaside admin (that could be nd5 encrypted too).
I hope you will have answers.
Very thanks for reading this a-bit-too-long mail,
--
Martial