Robert Shiplett explains his latest adventures in getting Seaside to push out Curl:
Seaside is an immensely flexible web framework when used for HTML + JavaScript + CSS + JSON + JQuery so it was only natural to want to use it simply as Seaside + Curl.
Using VW 7.7 and Seaside 3.0. There are a few hurdles; read his post for the details.
This week's podcast features our Product Manager, Arden Thomas, at one of this year's world tour events. In this podcast, Arden sketches out a WebVelocity use scenario. As I mentioned last week, the 1.1 beta is coming soon - if you're interested in taking a look at the beta when it's ready, send me an email.
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While I haven't played this type of caching game with Seaside, I've done very similiar things with my blog server (which is an SSP/Servlet type of thing):
my point is that I needed some simple caching of a method's results to help a page load a little faster in Seaside. All I did was add a new instance variable to my model instance that lazy-loaded the result of the calculation. I then added a few more places where this "cache" gets invalidated from other method calls, and I'm done. I didn't have to install gems, configure a new server like memcache, read docs on a gem's interface to memcache, etc. I simply leveraged the tools available in Smalltalk, and built a simple thing that just works. I don't have to worry about persisting it as its lazy-loaded. Which really is how memcache is usually used with Rails, as a place to temporarily store the results of an expensive computation
Yeah, adding a caching scheme to a Smalltalk web app is pretty simple. It's one more way that having an image makes things easier - and not just at development time.
Today's Smalltalk Daily is part 8 of our updated Seaside tutorial, for VW 7.7/OS 8.2 and Seaside 3.0. The tutorial home page is here. Today we ajaxify the filtering of posts - we're using Scriptaculous, but you should be aware that Seaside 3.0 also has JQuery support. If you're picking things up here, grab the work in progress to this point, and the download the domain model being used. Also, a tip of the hat to Julian Fitzell, who got me over a small hurdle I was having with the Scriptaculous updater code. Click on the viewer below to watch it now:
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Tune in next Friday (May 28) at 2 PM EDT to hear us talk with Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager (Arden Thomas) about the soon to be released VW 7.7.1 and OS 8.2. We'll also talk about the roadmap going forward.
