21 Nov
2006
21 Nov
'06
6:55 p.m.
Hi Martial,
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.
welcome to Seaside/Magritte/Pier ;-)
So far your configuration looks pretty standard for such a setup.
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.
This is what is implemented in PRImagePersistency. If you have
OSProcess loaded it will do it nicely in the background, else it will
just do a snapshot and block the VM for a few seconds while saving. I
am successfully using this method for all my Pier images. Have a look
at the implementation, there are a lot of things that you can tweak
and change there.
Keith Hodges did a persistency implementation using the object
database Magma. This looks very promising and I think this will be
the way to go in the future. I am sure he is willing to tell you more
about it ...
There are a couple of other persistency strategies floating around,
check out the mailing list archive.
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.
I am not responsible for this server, but I know the problem: the
versions of Pier and Seaside do not match.
To answer your question: in the Seaside configuration interface there
is a setting to choose among different error handlers or implement
your very own one ...
Cheers,
Lukas
--
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch