January 2013 - Pharo-users - lists.pharo.org

Re: [Pharo-users] Phaas - anyone interested in setting up Pharo as a Service?

by Sven Van Caekenberghe

On 28 Jan 2013, at 11:10, Nick Smith <life2point0(a)gmail.com> wrote: > My friend pays $350 month for a bunch of apps, and considers it money well > spent. I think that the developer community has a tendency to compare the > price of of services with the price of open source software (free) and > assume that no-one will pay. In the commercial world though, the comparison > is with what it would cost you for hosting PLUS sys admin.. which, for most > organisations is both a pain in the ass and very expensive. Yes, any serious company making real money, will normally pay closer to $1000/month and often much more for infrastructure. Regarding Heroku, I guess it would be a manageable, realistic project to do a third-party build pack for Pharo Smalltalk, with interfaces to some of the underlying infrastructure (Glorp for PostgreSQL, memcached, maybe also ampq) and to integrate a bit in their ecosystem (logging, monitoring), using some base image containing the necessary libraries, with some vm+image on dynamo validation. There are many others (and thus examples): https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/third-party-buildpacks This does cost work and thus money. I know there are ways to monetize addons in the Heroku world, so that is a possibility as well. Sven -- Sven Van Caekenberghe http://stfx.eu Smalltalk is the Red Pill

Jan. 28, 2013

petit parser

by Hilaire Fernandes

Hello I try to extent the example of the arithmetic evaluator[1], I don't understand the magic underneath nor how you will make it works with substraction. Changing method add to: add ^ prod, ($+ asParser / $- asParser) trim, term to parse mixture addition and substraction is wrong: parser parse: '1 - 2 + 6' -> #(1 $- #(2 $+ 6)) The precedence is wrong. How will you make it work? It seems to me the way to handle precedence in the example is not suited for extension Thanks Hilaire [1] http://pharobooks.gforge.inria.fr/PharoByExampleTwo-Eng/latest/

Jan. 28, 2013

Re: [Pharo-users] Phaas - anyone interested in setting up Pharo as a Service?

by Francois Stephany

That's good to know :) What do they consider? Sysadmin+custom servers? Are you allowed to quantify the load, size of data and budget? Me needs are pretty basic so I assume other's are :p On 28/01/13 11:23, phil(a)highoctane.be wrote: > I am currently busy with a client who does solid stuff. This means > sizeable chunks of money, way above that pricepoint. > > Phil > > 2013/1/28 Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven(a)stfx.eu <mailto:sven@stfx.eu>> > > > On 28 Jan 2013, at 10:49, Francois Stephany > <tulipe.moutarde(a)gmail.com <mailto:tulipe.moutarde@gmail.com>> wrote: > > > It's hard to evaluate the market size for a Pharo/Seaside PaaS. > Who would pay for it? How much? Do you mind paying 10~20â¬/month per > app for a small instance? > > Euh, that seems like extremely cheap - I am not a RoR/Heroku user, > but it seems they are way more expensive, hundreds of $ per month > for anything non-trivial, right ? > > -- http://tulipemoutarde.be +32 65 709 131

Jan. 28, 2013

Re: [Pharo-users] Phaas - anyone interested in setting up Pharo as a Service?

by phil＠highoctane.be

I am currently busy with a client who does solid stuff. This means sizeable chunks of money, way above that pricepoint. Phil 2013/1/28 Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven(a)stfx.eu> > > On 28 Jan 2013, at 10:49, Francois Stephany <tulipe.moutarde(a)gmail.com> > wrote: > > > It's hard to evaluate the market size for a Pharo/Seaside PaaS. Who > would pay for it? How much? Do you mind paying 10~20â¬/month per app for a > small instance? > > Euh, that seems like extremely cheap - I am not a RoR/Heroku user, but it > seems they are way more expensive, hundreds of $ per month for anything > non-trivial, right ? > >

Jan. 28, 2013

Re: [Pharo-users] Phaas - anyone interested in setting up Pharo as a Service?

by Francois Stephany

Yep but the first stage is free and is honestly more than enough for a small website/app (which I guess is the target if 95% Pier setups). Then more processing power (or a background job queue) starts at $35. Database is free up to 10k rows ($9/month up to 10M rows). If you want more data/robustness/speed a database with a 400MB cache is $50/month. I don't know the size of a typical smalltalk webapp but it seems to me that 80% of them are pretty lightweight. The remaining 20% probably already have their custom setup suiting their needs. But I would love to be completely wrong. On 28/01/13 10:55, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote: > > On 28 Jan 2013, at 10:49, Francois Stephany <tulipe.moutarde(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> It's hard to evaluate the market size for a Pharo/Seaside PaaS. Who would pay for it? How much? Do you mind paying 10~20â¬/month per app for a small instance? > > Euh, that seems like extremely cheap - I am not a RoR/Heroku user, but it seems they are way more expensive, hundreds of $ per month for anything non-trivial, right ? >

Jan. 28, 2013

Re: [Pharo-users] Phaas - anyone interested in setting up Pharo as a Service?

by Nick Smith

> It's hard to evaluate the market size for a Pharo/Seaside PaaS. Who > would pay for it? How much? Do you mind paying 10~20â¬/month per app for > a small instance. My friend pays $350 month for a bunch of apps, and considers it money well spent. I think that the developer community has a tendency to compare the price of of services with the price of open source software (free) and assume that no-one will pay. In the commercial world though, the comparison is with what it would cost you for hosting PLUS sys admin.. which, for most organisations is both a pain in the ass and very expensive. As Sven mentioned, this is very much a chicken and egg situation. -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Phaas-anyone-interested-in-setting-up-Pharo-as-a-Serv… Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Jan. 28, 2013

Re: [Pharo-users] Phaas - anyone interested in setting up Pharo as a Service?

by Sven Van Caekenberghe

On 28 Jan 2013, at 10:49, Francois Stephany <tulipe.moutarde(a)gmail.com> wrote: > It's hard to evaluate the market size for a Pharo/Seaside PaaS. Who would pay for it? How much? Do you mind paying 10~20â¬/month per app for a small instance? Euh, that seems like extremely cheap - I am not a RoR/Heroku user, but it seems they are way more expensive, hundreds of $ per month for anything non-trivial, right ?

Jan. 28, 2013

Re: [Pharo-users] Phaas - anyone interested in setting up Pharo as a Service?

by Sven Van Caekenberghe

Hi Andy, On 26 Jan 2013, at 02:02, Andy Burnett <andy.burnett(a)knowinnovation.com> wrote: > We would love to develop more of our ideas in Pharo, but we are completely allergic to doing sys admin. We don't want to deal with anything below the Pharo application level. What I would ideally like to see if something like Heroku, or similar, but for Pharo. However, just wishing won't make it happen, so I am wondering if there is anyone out there who is thinking about this, and whether there are enough of us to constitute are market. > > Our requirements are pretty simple. We need a way of uploading an image, and some standard for of persistence. At this point, we would be perfectly happy to make compromises by agreeing that it had to be e.g. Mongo or whatever (although ideally it would be gemstone). We just want to make some progress on this. > > Personally, I think lots of bits are coming together. We now have various persistence options, websockets (both in Zinc and Aida-web), OAuth ( in both places again), and lots of other exciting elements. We just want a really simple way to take advantage of them. > > Does anyone else feel this need? (I am reacting to the whole thread - all this is IMHO) Yes, I think this would be nice to have. The way I see it, the necessary technology is all there. Even better: it was all there years ago (Seaside, AIDA/Web, Glorp, seasidehosting.st, and so much more), and in recent years we made important progress (Pharo taking off as the most forward thinking open source Smalltalk, Cog VM doubling performance, many, many large and small projects adding more and more technologies, interesting fundamental changes in Pharo which are and will pay off big time in the future). If you have been following this list, you know that deploying all kinds of Pharo Smalltalk based applications in the cloud is daily business. But of course, it requires some expertise, some of which is outside Smalltalk itself. A number of people, including myself, could help you with the definition of a production architecture and a way to deploy and operate your application. In the realm of more managed solutions, OpenShift has been done, CloudFoundry has been done. It is not that hard, but it is still pretty technical. So your idea comes down to an easier to use platform for deploying. I would consider uploading images a bit old school. Just specify your app as a Metacello configuration, and let it build by a continuous integration farm working in stages to deal with the longer build times of some packages, but with unit tests. To run, a single expression passed along the command line is enough. Of course, a nice web based management interface is necessary. The challenge is this: to make the platform easier to use, the process and solution space have to be simplified, and choices have to be made. In a community like ours with so many intelligent but also strong headed people, it can be hard to find consensus. In general, that is not a problem: more choices, alternatives, competing ideas, may the best win, are OK - fragmentation is the price to pay. But many complicated choices and alternatives are in conflict with an easy to use platform. For example, Google Apps has a limited set of very specific services, you can't install arbitrary code (so also no Smalltalk). This makes for one clear way to use it. Hence, it might be easier to use. Now, the perspective of doing this commercially is challenging. There currently are probably only a limited number of people really willing to pay for this (and it would depend very much on the choices being made). But that might be a chicken and egg problem: before Ruby on Rails, Ruby was certainly a niche language, in the beginning of RoR, it probably made little sense to do Heroku. But even today, not everybody deploys to Heroku, because they need more control (over resource or money). Maybe it just takes somebody crazy enough to try. Sven -- Sven Van Caekenberghe http://stfx.eu Smalltalk is the Red Pill

Jan. 28, 2013

Re: [Pharo-users] Phaas - anyone interested in setting up Pharo as a Service?

by Francois Stephany

Yep, same here. I still use Rails for almost all my client work. Not because of the language/framework but because of a common full stack and easy deployment options (handling attachment is a breeze, deploying is ridiculous). I'm not sure those benefits still stand for big apps you develop in house but for small-medium client work they are crucial. Saying that, most the tools should be portable to Pharo/Seaside quite easily. For example: Error handling: https://github.com/errbit/errbit http://airbrakeapp.com/pages/home Stats and log aggregator: https://github.com/etsy/statsd http://graphite.wikidot.com/screen-shots It's hard to evaluate the market size for a Pharo/Seaside PaaS. Who would pay for it? How much? Do you mind paying 10~20â¬/month per app for a small instance? On 28/01/13 10:32, Nick Smith wrote: > This is very timely. For last three years I have been trying to get my Rails > developer friend (they build fairly large scale educational products) to > take a look at Pharo/Seaside/Gemstone... and, funnily enough, the last time > we discussed this was 3 days ago over lunch at our local Cafe. > > But this time he didn't say anything. He just passed me his iPad and showed > me the Heroku app managing live performance and services of their > applications, with real time monitoring for any latency or bottlenecks > issues. He told me they could not seriously consider moving to another > language/framework without the same peace of mind of knowing the back-end > was well taken care of, so they could focus on development... and know that > scaling their applications was no longer an issue. > > It seems that for most enterprises, hosted 'back-end management' is now the > single most important factor in the decision making process of what > language/framework to go with. > > > > -- > View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Phaas-anyone-interested-in-setting-up-Pharo-as-a-Serv… > Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > -- http://tulipemoutarde.be +32 65 709 131

Jan. 28, 2013

Re: [Pharo-users] Phaas - anyone interested in setting up Pharo as a Service?

by Nick Smith

This is very timely. For last three years I have been trying to get my Rails developer friend (they build fairly large scale educational products) to take a look at Pharo/Seaside/Gemstone... and, funnily enough, the last time we discussed this was 3 days ago over lunch at our local Cafe. But this time he didn't say anything. He just passed me his iPad and showed me the Heroku app managing live performance and services of their applications, with real time monitoring for any latency or bottlenecks issues. He told me they could not seriously consider moving to another language/framework without the same peace of mind of knowing the back-end was well taken care of, so they could focus on development... and know that scaling their applications was no longer an issue. It seems that for most enterprises, hosted 'back-end management' is now the single most important factor in the decision making process of what language/framework to go with. -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Phaas-anyone-interested-in-setting-up-Pharo-as-a-Serv… Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Jan. 28, 2013