Welcome Patrick,
I am just getting started with Magritte and/or Pier.
The goal is to
edit some fairly lengthy form-like objects: people, property, and
transactions involving those things.
not knowing much this feels very Pier-like, with each of these
created in a form-based editor and links among them.
this sounds like something reasonable to do with Magritte/Pier.
On the transaction side there is a need to send
subsets of these
things off to other sites and systems, and then create new related
things from the results, e.g. "proposals" and so on.
So as I understand the tools, Magritte would be good to describe
these things and Seaside would be good for the transactional user
interfaces. Just HTTP and HTTPS would be used on the back end of
the transactions.
For the server side there is only HTTP natively supported by Squeak,
however you can easily do HTTPS by proxying trough an Apache server.
The same for the client slide, Squeak does only HTTP, however there
is a lipCurl plugin coming that will make HTTPS access possible as well.
How well would Pier fit in here? i.e. creating the
objects in Pier
and then having some Seaside and other code refer to those objects,
formatting them for HTTP methods.
Seaside is an abstraction over HTTP/HTML, there is not much of these
low-level protocols that you actually see while working with this
framework. Pier is again another layer of abstraction on top of that.
Of course you always have the possibility to go as deep down to the
basic protocols as you like, however this is not the aim of Seaside
and Pier.
On the back end of the transactions I'd want to
parse the incoming
information and create Pier objects from those.
Sounds reasonable and fairly simple to do. The parsing will be
probably the most difficult thing ;-)
Cheers,
Lukas
--
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch