October 2019 - Pharo-users - lists.pharo.org

Re: [Pharo-users] voyage mongo and transactionality

by Smalltalk

I have used OmniBase extensively long ago with DolphinÂ Smalltalk (the Dolphin repository can be read & writen by VisualÂ Works too). Even the Dolphin repository can be under Windows and Linux (using Samba). You can distribute instances ODBContainer through a LAN. OmniBase use "multiversion concurrency control" to hold different version of the same object (in different transactions). OmniBase is pretty cool but if need a lot of indexes (indexes on more than one inst var ) you have to solve the problem yourself using OmniBase b-trees. regards bruno El 09/10/2019 a las 15:33, PBKResearch escribiÃ³: > > It may be irrelevant, but I have been playing recently with OmniBase, > which is a fully object-oriented database system, now over 20 years > old, but it still works very well for my uses. David GoriÅ¡ek, the > author, claims that it has ACID properties. From my reading, updates > operate on a proxy object, which is not written to the database until > an explicit commit is given. A second transaction accessing the same > object will still see the original until the change is committed. What > happens to a proxy which is never committed is not clear, but if > GoriÅ¡ek is right, the stored data can never be contaminated. I think a > proxy in this sense is equivalent to a memento. > > Thanks to Esteban Lorenzano, OmniBase is now available on Pharo. The > code is ancient, there is no documentation and obviously no support, > but it might be worth while for someone to try some software > archaeology and put it to use. I have found it possible to create and > maintain a small database of natural language information, and access > is fairly quick and easy â and itâs all Smalltalk. > > It claims to store all kinds of Smalltalk objects, except block > closures, and skimming through the code it seems to incorporate a > serializer similar to Fuel. > > The only documentation I have found is a slideshow at > https://www.slideshare.net/esug/omni-baseobjectdatabase. I have found > out a few things about it, if anyone is interested. > > Peter Kenny > > *From:*Pharo-users <pharo-users-bounces(a)lists.pharo.org> *On Behalf Of > *Norbert Hartl > *Sent:* 09 October 2019 18:08 > *To:* Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> > *Subject:* Re: [Pharo-users] voyage mongo and transactionality > > > Am 09.10.2019 um 16:48 schrieb "jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de > <mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de>" <jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de > <mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de>>: > > This is a tricky mine field. Sometimes you need a lot of business > functionality in objects referenced in your objects that are > currently in the editor. So I'm still to see a project in which > the memento pattern really worked for more complex scenarios. How > deep do you dive to have enough memento objects to provide the > functionality needed. I guess you can do that with some sort of > object-level transaction framework that automatically creates > mementos of whatever object is being navigated to during some kind > of processing-context. I guess slots could be of use here. But > this is not trivial for general cases. > > Yes it is tricky. You can have copies of business objects but you have > always references to the business objects not pointing to the copy. > > And you need to know which objects should be tracked. In Gemstone IIRC > it is easy as it is the time the object is copied from the stone to > the gem it is registered in the current transaction. So you can check > it and committing if it changed because you have to write it back. The > important point here might be get noticed when a reference is > acquired. In pharo it is not that easy but could be done if object > would be reified and interceptable. > > In my experience, this problem area makes for the other 70% of the > time spent on developing GUI or Web applications, besides the 60% > for GUI design and implementation and 25% business logic... > > 70% + 60% + 25% + 30% = 185% > > sounds indeed very realistic if it comes to project planning. ðThere > is even a rule saying that for the first 90% of the project you need > the first 90% of time and for the last 10% of the project you need the > second 90% of time. > > I'd be interested to learn about patterns to handle such more > complex things. We constantly travel back and forth between > implementing stuff in the GUI handlers (copying values to the GUI > classes that access themselves during GUI operations and push > values to the business objects when the users clicks on OK), using > mementos (which most of the times are nets of mementos that are > created manually - "we know what we'll touch in this Editor") and > operating on business objects directly and relying on the > persistence mechanism (Glorp in our case) and its rollback > behaviour. All three have lots of weaknesses and seem to have > their place nevertheless. > > So this is a very interesting discussion and I think this is an > area that has not been solved yet. > > I think it isnât solved and I find every piece of information about it > very interesting. > > Norbert > > Joachim > > Am 09.10.19 um 16:25 schrieb James Foster: > > Thanks for the explanation. And, yes, this is an artifact of > your design; if you put intermediate values into domain > objects then they will remain in your domain objects to be > seen later. >From what youâve described, I donât see how it > would be any different in a non-image environment (Java, C#, > etc.), unless you re-read the entire object graph from the > database. As someone else mentioned, this would be a good > place for the Memento Pattern. > > James > > > > On Oct 9, 2019, at 1:59 AM, Jonathan van Alteren > <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com > <mailto:jvalteren@objectguild.com>> wrote: > > Hi James, > > I see how my explanation might be unclear. > > We have a main form for the agenda and a subform for an > item, which is shown using Seaside call/answer. The save > button of the subform is clicked, which adds the item to > the underlying agenda model object, but the save button of > the main form _is not_Â clicked by the user. The callback > for the main save button sends the save message to the > agenda object, causing the database to be updated. > > So yes, the browser does submit the data on the subform, > it's the main form component that doesn't receive the save > button callback. I realize that this is in large part an > issue with our design. However, the way object persistence > seems to work in the image environment plays a large role. > > Kind regards, > > Jonathan van Alteren > > Founding Member | Object Guild > jvalteren(a)objectguild.com <mailto:jvalteren@objectguild.com> > > On 8 Oct 2019, 15:41 +0200, James Foster > <Smalltalk(a)jgfoster.net <mailto:Smalltalk@jgfoster.net>>, > wrote: > > > > On Oct 8, 2019, at 3:05 AM, Jonathan van Alteren > <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com > <mailto:jvalteren@objectguild.com>> wrote: > > We've encountered an issue where a user makes > changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save > button. Instead, the user closes the browser or > uses the navigation to go to a different part of > the application. When navigating back to the > original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. > items added) are still being displayed, even > though they were never explicitly saved. > > > Here is what I donât understand: how did the change > get from the userâs client agent (browser) to the > server? If you make a change to a field in a form and > then close the browser, who sent the change to the > server? If you show the save domain value in a > different location, with a dynamically-generated id > and name (so it isnât cached in the browser), or > written to the Pharo Transcript, does the value still > change? That is, are you sure that the change is in > the reflected in the Smalltalk image and not just > somehow cached in the browser? > > James > > -- > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchelmailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de > > Fliederweg 1http://www.objektfabrik.de > > D-71640 Ludwigsburghttp://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com > > Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1 >

Oct. 10, 2019

Re: [Pharo-users] voyage mongo and transactionality

by Norbert Hartl

> Am 10.10.2019 um 12:31 schrieb Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com>: > > Hah, those percentages feel very real to me at the moment :-S > > Can you explain what GemStone IIRC means? (Novice speaking here :-)) If GemStone solves this at the moment an object goes from Stone to Gem, perhaps we can take that architecture as an example and somehow apply it locally within the same image? What would be required for something like that? Just thinking out loud here... > IIRC means âif I remember correctlyâ ;) Gemstone as the name says is a combination of gem and stone. Stone is the database part in the system that manages the global heap. A gem is more or less what a pharo vm is. When a gem opens a transaction all used objects get copied from the stone in the gem heap. On committing the transaction the gem writes back the data to the stone. This is very brief and mostly not exactly like that but gives the picture Norbert > > Kind regards, > > Jonathan van Alteren > > Founding Member | Object Guild > jvalteren(a)objectguild.com >> On 9 Oct 2019, 19:09 +0200, Norbert Hartl <norbert(a)hartl.name>, wrote: >> >> >> Am 09.10.2019 um 16:48 schrieb "jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de" <jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de>: >> >>> >>> This is a tricky mine field. Sometimes you need a lot of business functionality in objects referenced in your objects that are currently in the editor. So I'm still to see a project in which the memento pattern really worked for more complex scenarios. How deep do you dive to have enough memento objects to provide the functionality needed. I guess you can do that with some sort of object-level transaction framework that automatically creates mementos of whatever object is being navigated to during some kind of processing-context. I guess slots could be of use here. But this is not trivial for general cases. >> >> Yes it is tricky. You can have copies of business objects but you have always references to the business objects not pointing to the copy. >> And you need to know which objects should be tracked. In Gemstone IIRC it is easy as it is the time the object is copied from the stone to the gem it is registered in the current transaction. So you can check it and committing if it changed because you have to write it back. The important point here might be get noticed when a reference is acquired. In pharo it is not that easy but could be done if object would be reified and interceptable. >>> In my experience, this problem area makes for the other 70% of the time spent on developing GUI or Web applications, besides the 60% for GUI design and implementation and 25% business logic... >>> >> 70% + 60% + 25% + 30% = 185% >> >> sounds indeed very realistic if it comes to project planning. ðThere is even a rule saying that for the first 90% of the project you need the first 90% of time and for the last 10% of the project you need the second 90% of time. >>> I'd be interested to learn about patterns to handle such more complex things. We constantly travel back and forth between implementing stuff in the GUI handlers (copying values to the GUI classes that access themselves during GUI operations and push values to the business objects when the users clicks on OK), using mementos (which most of the times are nets of mementos that are created manually - "we know what we'll touch in this Editor") and operating on business objects directly and relying on the persistence mechanism (Glorp in our case) and its rollback behaviour. All three have lots of weaknesses and seem to have their place nevertheless. >>> >>> So this is a very interesting discussion and I think this is an area that has not been solved yet. >>> >> I think it isnât solved and I find every piece of information about it very interesting. >> >> Norbert >>> Joachim >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>>> Am 09.10.19 um 16:25 schrieb James Foster: >>>> Thanks for the explanation. And, yes, this is an artifact of your design; if you put intermediate values into domain objects then they will remain in your domain objects to be seen later. From what youâve described, I donât see how it would be any different in a non-image environment (Java, C#, etc.), unless you re-read the entire object graph from the database. As someone else mentioned, this would be a good place for the Memento Pattern. >>>> >>>> James >>>> >>>>> On Oct 9, 2019, at 1:59 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com> wrote: >>>>> >>>>> Hi James, >>>>> >>>>> I see how my explanation might be unclear. >>>>> >>>>> We have a main form for the agenda and a subform for an item, which is shown using Seaside call/answer. The save button of the subform is clicked, which adds the item to the underlying agenda model object, but the save button of the main form is not clicked by the user. The callback for the main save button sends the save message to the agenda object, causing the database to be updated. >>>>> >>>>> So yes, the browser does submit the data on the subform, it's the main form component that doesn't receive the save button callback. I realize that this is in large part an issue with our design. However, the way object persistence seems to work in the image environment plays a large role. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> Kind regards, >>>>> >>>>> Jonathan van Alteren >>>>> >>>>> Founding Member | Object Guild >>>>> jvalteren(a)objectguild.com >>>>>> On 8 Oct 2019, 15:41 +0200, James Foster <Smalltalk(a)jgfoster.net>, wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>>> On Oct 8, 2019, at 3:05 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com> wrote: >>>>>>> >>>>>>> We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved. >>>>>> >>>>>> Here is what I donât understand: how did the change get from the userâs client agent (browser) to the server? If you make a change to a field in a form and then close the browser, who sent the change to the server? If you show the save domain value in a different location, with a dynamically-generated id and name (so it isnât cached in the browser), or written to the Pharo Transcript, does the value still change? That is, are you sure that the change is in the reflected in the Smalltalk image and not just somehow cached in the browser? >>>>>> >>>>>> James >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>> >>> >>> -- >>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- >>> Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de >>> Fliederweg 1 http://www.objektfabrik.de >>> D-71640 Ludwigsburg http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com >>> Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0 Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1 >>> >>>

Oct. 10, 2019

Re: [Pharo-users] voyage mongo and transactionality

by Norbert Hartl

Hi, > Am 10.10.2019 um 11:48 schrieb Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com>: > > Hi Norbert, > > Thank you very much for your extensive answer. > > For starters, we would be happy to have an option available for the course grained handling that you mention. I'd be interested to hear if there are any options besides GemStone available to be used with Voyage/MongoDB. I think Gematone has a model that serves these use cases really well. In Pharo there is not much that makes your life easy. But most of this problems can be solved sufficiently kust not generically. Every use case has its constraints and you can model a solution for it. The main problem in voyage stays that the cache is per repository. We need to think along that line if a session or request cannot get its private copy of the database object. > Your mention of the Mongo cache being a weak dictionary is very interesting, I did not know that (it doesn't seem to be documented). Yes, the Seaside sessions seem to be the path through which these objects remain referenced. When I inspect all instances of our session class, I see old session objects hanging around that still reference our root application component with the rendering tree containing various references to our domain model objects. You asked Esteban about the cache. I answer that here. Everybody stumbles over the name cache and Esteban is reluctant to give it another name ð The cache is only for establishing identity in the image. The basic thing with objects in an external system is that its identity (location in the heap) becomes an identity parameter like an id. So when you have externalized objects and you load the object with the same id twice in the image you will make sure that there will only be one object for it and the object from the first query and from the second query are identical meaning comparing both with == returns true. So the cache keeps the database reference and the business object in a weak dictionary. If the object with the same id is queried from the database it returns the object it already has. If the object is not referenced anymore the entry will be removed from the cache. It is nothing more than this. > > Can you tell me why the session objects don't get garbage collected? > Should we manually clean up our session object somehow? > Iâm not sure what you mean. If the session is not referenced than it just means the garbage collector did not remove it. But this wonât keep the cache from removing the entry. But seaside sessions have an expiry time. So there is a duration while seaside keeps referencing the session and therefor all objects that are kept in the session are still connecte keeping the objects in the voyage cache. > I must admit I'm a bit out of my comfort zone here, after working in Java for close to 20 years ;-) We explicitly don't want to use any relational databases for our own application (perhaps only for integrating with customer data). I still haven't fully integrated the conceptual differences in my mental model, about how to work with objects in an image based/object persistence environment. > > I did look into using a Voyage repository filter, which is mentioned (or buried deep I should say ;-)) in this post: https://pharoweekly.wordpress.com/2017/02/20/consortium-action-13-17-feb/. What if we were to use a dynamic variable like this for each session instance? Then at least each user will have her/his own cache. But that doesn't answer the need for a kind of rollback mechanism within the same Voyage cache/session. And then there is your comment about potentially having multiple copies of an identical object... As I told in my last mail. The session or request based cache has also problems because if you attach an object you queried while in the session/request to somewhere more global you introduce subtle bugs. Maybe we need a two level cache, one that knows all objects referenced in the image and one that keeps the private copies based on the image based cache. This way we could know that multiple sessions/request are keeping a copy of the same object and we could determine merge conflicts. Need to think more about this > > I wonder what patterns other Seaside 'enterprise' application developers are using. > > You are right, the term object transactionality doesn't make much sense ;-) We are not using Magritte (and probably won't). I don't know much about Magritte, but it feels like it might be incompatible with the behavioral, 'pure' object approach that we want to use. However, I am interested to investigate. Can you recommend any good documentation sources for learning Magritte from an application architecture perspective? > Magritte is a meta description of your objects. It is like having powerful annotation objects. These can be used to create different views on your model. There is the PhD paper of Lukas Renggli on the net and maybe something in the pharo for the enterprise book. > Also, I'm interested to hear more about the modification tracking approach you are working on. Please drop me a personal note if you are willing to collaborate on this. > Iâm happy to pick up that stuff. It is just that as always there is not enough time to do it. But at least I can (yet again) try to rip it out from out r product and release something Norbert > > Kind regards, > > Jonathan van Alteren > > Founding Member | Object Guild > jvalteren(a)objectguild.com >> On 8 Oct 2019, 12:54 +0200, Norbert Hartl <norbert(a)hartl.name>, wrote: >> Hi, >> >>> Am 08.10.2019 um 12:05 schrieb Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com>: >>> >>> Hello all, >>> >>> We are having some issues with using Voyage/Mongo for a customer project that I'd like to get your feedback on. >>> >>> The customer application is a form based business web application using Seaside with object persistence using Voyage with MongoDB on Pharo 7.0. The application is deployed on a dedicated Linux production server running MongoDB version 4.2. >>> >>> The application is used to manage meeting agendas and minutes. After opening the agenda view of a future meeting, the user can add an item to the agenda by clicking a button. This calls an item editor component which answers when a Save or Cancel button is clicked. The agenda view component itself also has a Save button, which performs a Voyage save of the object aggregate (agenda + items). >>> >>> We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved. >>> >>> It does not matter if we select the agenda aggregate object instance using Voyage or access it in a different way. Changes to the state of the object are retained, even though a Voyage save was never sent to the agenda instance. The cause seems to be that the Voyage repository caches the object instance and thus on select, it returns an object that is in a different state than how it was persisted. >>> >>> This all seems to come down to object transactionality. >>> >>> We have a need to 'cancel' changes made to an object instance. Before working with Pharo/Smalltalk in a non-image based environment, I was used to do this by retrieving the original object from persistence again. This also allowed for a convenient way to detect changes to an object's state, which we are missing at the moment too. >>> >>> We know that moving to GemStone can help us with these issues, but our current planning of customer projects does not allow us to do this within the next 3 months. And we really need to find a way to tackle these issues . >>> >>> >>> Your feedback is greatly appreciated! >>> >> this is none to be confusing to a lot of people. If you map a memory object graph to a database there are no intrinsic points of transactions unless you put them into your application model. Gemstone or any transaction based handling wonât help you if your use case is not as coarse grained as discarding all modified data and not just some. Or you need to hop into nested transactions which are supported by Gemstone IMHO but there is rules to care about, too, if you want to use them. >> >> Regarding your application you modify data and this is kept. The cache in mongo is a weak dictionary. This means that if you get the object with the changes a second time it means these objects are referenced somewhere. Seaside sessions seems to be the obvious thing here. If you have a reachable object (e.g. server singleton -> handler -> seaside -> seaside session -> business object) then mongo keeps the object in its cache because it needs to be able to establish identity on further queries. Ein emoving all the changes from an object you keep in memory wouldnât be really good if the persistence layer would do it. >> >> The problem is obvious but the solution is not. We could make the cache session or request based which would circumvent the problem. But if an object would be attached to something outside the session/request which you cannot forbid it causes real problems like multiple copies to an identical object. >> >> I donât know what you mean with object transactionality because it makes no sense in my head. But you have basically two approaches to solve the problem. If you would use magritte you would have it at hand. There each UI component gets just a memento of the business object for modification. You need to commit the UI component in order to modify the business object. So you can commit on user interaction and separately on persistence which allows a huge set of use cases. >> The other one Iâm working on since a while is a proper modification tracking. In this you change the objects directly but have a registry with the dirty objects which you can act upon. I have a sample modification tracker that uses readOnly object write barrier for objects. On write attempt it registers the object and the write operation as command pattern. You can undo modifications of a single object where all commmands are undone on that object. Or you abort all modifications at once. It is basically working but has the problems on concurrent access. As the mongo cache is image wide two concurrent requests interfere with each other. >> So you can see that the problem is not that easy to solve. >> >> TL;DR a memento approach might your best and cleanest option right now. >> >> Norbert >>> >>> Kind regards, >>> >>> >>> Jonathan van Alteren >>> >>> Founding Member | Object Guild >>> jvalteren(a)objectguild.com >>> >> >>

Oct. 10, 2019

Re: [Pharo-users] voyage mongo and transactionality

by Jonathan van Alteren

Hi Peter, Thanks for your reply. That sounds very interesting. For similar reasons, I tried to check out Magma. However, since I'm still a novice in Pharo/Smalltalk and it's not very well documented (and mostly refers to Squeak), it's quite painful to figure out how it works and how to get it going in Pharo. Not to mention actually using it in production for an 'enterprise' application for an actual customer... I haven't given that up yet, but currently don't have the time. I will look into OmniBase. Anything you're willing to share about getting it up and running (in Pharo 7.0 64-bit) is greatly appreciated! Kind regards, Jonathan van Alteren Founding Member | Object Guild jvalteren(a)objectguild.com On 9 Oct 2019, 20:34 +0200, PBKResearch <peter(a)pbkresearch.co.uk>, wrote: > It may be irrelevant, but I have been playing recently with OmniBase, which is a fully object-oriented database system, now over 20 years old, but it still works very well for my uses. David GoriÅ¡ek, the author, claims that it has ACID properties. From my reading, updates operate on a proxy object, which is not written to the database until an explicit commit is given. A second transaction accessing the same object will still see the original until the change is committed. What happens to a proxy which is never committed is not clear, but if GoriÅ¡ek is right, the stored data can never be contaminated. I think a proxy in this sense is equivalent to a memento. > > Thanks to Esteban Lorenzano, OmniBase is now available on Pharo. The code is ancient, there is no documentation and obviously no support, but it might be worth while for someone to try some software archaeology and put it to use. I have found it possible to create and maintain a small database of natural language information, and access is fairly quick and easy â and itâs all Smalltalk. > It claims to store all kinds of Smalltalk objects, except block closures, and skimming through the code it seems to incorporate a serializer similar to Fuel. > > The only documentation I have found is a slideshow at https://www.slideshare.net/esug/omni-baseobjectdatabase. I have found out a few things about it, if anyone is interested. > > Peter Kenny > > > From: Pharo-users <pharo-users-bounces(a)lists.pharo.org> On Behalf Of Norbert Hartl > Sent: 09 October 2019 18:08 > To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> > Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] voyage mongo and transactionality > > > > Am 09.10.2019 um 16:48 schrieb "jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de" <jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de>: > > > > This is a tricky mine field. Sometimes you need a lot of business functionality in objects referenced in your objects that are currently in the editor. So I'm still to see a project in which the memento pattern really worked for more complex scenarios. How deep do you dive to have enough memento objects to provide the functionality needed. I guess you can do that with some sort of object-level transaction framework that automatically creates mementos of whatever object is being navigated to during some kind of processing-context. I guess slots could be of use here. But this is not trivial for general cases. > > Yes it is tricky. You can have copies of business objects but you have always references to the business objects not pointing to the copy. > And you need to know which objects should be tracked. In Gemstone IIRC it is easy as it is the time the object is copied from the stone to the gem it is registered in the current transaction. So you can check it and committing if it changed because you have to write it back. The important point here might be get noticed when a reference is acquired. In pharo it is not that easy but could be done if object would be reified and interceptable. > > In my experience, this problem area makes for the other 70% of the time spent on developing GUI or Web applications, besides the 60% for GUI design and implementation and 25% business logic... > 70% + 60% + 25% + 30% = 185% > > sounds indeed very realistic if it comes to project planning. ðThere is even a rule saying that for the first 90% of the project you need the first 90% of time and for the last 10% of the project you need the second 90% of time. > > > I'd be interested to learn about patterns to handle such more complex things. We constantly travel back and forth between implementing stuff in the GUI handlers (copying values to the GUI classes that access themselves during GUI operations and push values to the business objects when the users clicks on OK), using mementos (which most of the times are nets of mementos that are created manually - "we know what we'll touch in this Editor") and operating on business objects directly and relying on the persistence mechanism (Glorp in our case) and its rollback behaviour. All three have lots of weaknesses and seem to have their place nevertheless. > > So this is a very interesting discussion and I think this is an area that has not been solved yet. > I think it isnât solved and I find every piece of information about it very interesting. > > Norbert > > > Joachim > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Am 09.10.19 um 16:25 schrieb James Foster: > > > Thanks for the explanation. And, yes, this is an artifact of your design; if you put intermediate values into domain objects then they will remain in your domain objects to be seen later. From what youâve described, I donât see how it would be any different in a non-image environment (Java, C#, etc.), unless you re-read the entire object graph from the database. As someone else mentioned, this would be a good place for the Memento Pattern. > > > > > > James > > > > > > > > > > On Oct 9, 2019, at 1:59 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com> wrote: > > > > > > > > Hi James, > > > > > > > > I see how my explanation might be unclear. > > > > > > > > We have a main form for the agenda and a subform for an item, which is shown using Seaside call/answer. The save button of the subform is clicked, which adds the item to the underlying agenda model object, but the save button of the main form is notÂ clicked by the user. The callback for the main save button sends the save message to the agenda object, causing the database to be updated. > > > > > > > > So yes, the browser does submit the data on the subform, it's the main form component that doesn't receive the save button callback. I realize that this is in large part an issue with our design. However, the way object persistence seems to work in the image environment plays a large role. > > > > > > > > > > > > Kind regards, > > > > > > > > Jonathan van Alteren > > > > > > > > Founding Member | Object Guild > > > > jvalteren(a)objectguild.com > > > > On 8 Oct 2019, 15:41 +0200, James Foster <Smalltalk(a)jgfoster.net>, wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > On Oct 8, 2019, at 3:05 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com> wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > > We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved. > > > > > > > > > > Here is what I donât understand: how did the change get from the userâs client agent (browser) to the server? If you make a change to a field in a form and then close the browser, who sent the change to the server? If you show the save domain value in a different location, with a dynamically-generated id and name (so it isnât cached in the browser), or written to the Pharo Transcript, does the value still change? That is, are you sure that the change is in the reflected in the Smalltalk image and not just somehow cached in the browser? > > > > > > > > > > James > > > > > > > > > > > > -- > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de > > Fliederweg 1 http://www.objektfabrik.de > > D-71640 Ludwigsburg http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com > > Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0 Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1

Oct. 10, 2019

Re: [Pharo-users] voyage mongo and transactionality

by Jonathan van Alteren

Hah, those percentages feel very real to me at the moment :-S Can you explain what GemStone IIRC means? (Novice speaking here :-)) If GemStone solves this at the moment an object goes from Stone to Gem, perhaps we can take that architecture as an example and somehow apply it locally within the same image? What would be required for something like that? Just thinking out loud here... Kind regards, Jonathan van Alteren Founding Member | Object Guild jvalteren(a)objectguild.com On 9 Oct 2019, 19:09 +0200, Norbert Hartl <norbert(a)hartl.name>, wrote: > > > Am 09.10.2019 um 16:48 schrieb "jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de" <jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de>: > > > > > This is a tricky mine field. Sometimes you need a lot of business functionality in objects referenced in your objects that are currently in the editor. So I'm still to see a project in which the memento pattern really worked for more complex scenarios. How deep do you dive to have enough memento objects to provide the functionality needed. I guess you can do that with some sort of object-level transaction framework that automatically creates mementos of whatever object is being navigated to during some kind of processing-context. I guess slots could be of use here. But this is not trivial for general cases. > > Yes it is tricky. You can have copies of business objects but you have always references to the business objects not pointing to the copy. > And you need to know which objects should be tracked. In Gemstone IIRC it is easy as it is the time the object is copied from the stone to the gem it is registered in the current transaction. So you can check it and committing if it changed because you have to write it back. The important point here might be get noticed when a reference is acquired. In pharo it is not that easy but could be done if object would be reified and interceptable. > > In my experience, this problem area makes for the other 70% of the time spent on developing GUI or Web applications, besides the 60% for GUI design and implementation and 25% business logic... > 70% + 60% + 25% + 30% = 185% > > sounds indeed very realistic if it comes to project planning. ðThere is even a rule saying that for the first 90% of the project you need the first 90% of time and for the last 10% of the project you need the second 90% of time. > > I'd be interested to learn about patterns to handle such more complex things. We constantly travel back and forth between implementing stuff in the GUI handlers (copying values to the GUI classes that access themselves during GUI operations and push values to the business objects when the users clicks on OK), using mementos (which most of the times are nets of mementos that are created manually - "we know what we'll touch in this Editor") and operating on business objects directly and relying on the persistence mechanism (Glorp in our case) and its rollback behaviour. All three have lots of weaknesses and seem to have their place nevertheless. > > So this is a very interesting discussion and I think this is an area that has not been solved yet. > I think it isnât solved and I find every piece of information about it very interesting. > > Norbert > > Joachim > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Am 09.10.19 um 16:25 schrieb James Foster: > > > Thanks for the explanation. And, yes, this is an artifact of your design; if you put intermediate values into domain objects then they will remain in your domain objects to be seen later. From what youâve described, I donât see how it would be any different in a non-image environment (Java, C#, etc.), unless you re-read the entire object graph from the database. As someone else mentioned, this would be a good place for the Memento Pattern. > > > > > > James > > > > > > > On Oct 9, 2019, at 1:59 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com> wrote: > > > > > > > > Hi James, > > > > > > > > I see how my explanation might be unclear. > > > > > > > > We have a main form for the agenda and a subform for an item, which is shown using Seaside call/answer. The save button of the subform is clicked, which adds the item to the underlying agenda model object, but the save button of the main form is notÂ clicked by the user. The callback for the main save button sends the save message to the agenda object, causing the database to be updated. > > > > > > > > So yes, the browser does submit the data on the subform, it's the main form component that doesn't receive the save button callback. I realize that this is in large part an issue with our design. However, the way object persistence seems to work in the image environment plays a large role. > > > > > > > > > > > > Kind regards, > > > > > > > > Jonathan van Alteren > > > > > > > > Founding Member | Object Guild > > > > jvalteren(a)objectguild.com > > > > On 8 Oct 2019, 15:41 +0200, James Foster <Smalltalk(a)jgfoster.net>, wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > On Oct 8, 2019, at 3:05 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com> wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > > We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved. > > > > > > > > > > Here is what I donât understand: how did the change get from the userâs client agent (browser) to the server? If you make a change to a field in a form and then close the browser, who sent the change to the server? If you show the save domain value in a different location, with a dynamically-generated id and name (so it isnât cached in the browser), or written to the Pharo Transcript, does the value still change? That is, are you sure that the change is in the reflected in the Smalltalk image and not just somehow cached in the browser? > > > > > > > > > > James > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > -- > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de > > Fliederweg 1 http://www.objektfabrik.de > > D-71640 Ludwigsburg http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com > > Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0 Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1 > > > >

Oct. 10, 2019

Re: [Pharo-users] voyage mongo and transactionality

by Jonathan van Alteren

Hi Joachim, Thank you for your feedback. It feels good to know we're not alone in this :-) Unfortunately, the things you describe are familiar to me. My business partner Dave West has a lot of experience with applying a behavioral, 'pure' object design approach. We're looking hard into simplifying these matters through the application of inversion of control and by making objects as autonomous as they can possible be. At the same time, we haven't found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow yet ;-) Nowadays, a fair amount of applications have a very direct way of handling user interactions and resulting state changes. For example, the settings of my Firefox browser doesn't have a save button anymore. Anything I change looks to be automatically persisted. Perhaps there is some value in that approach for 'enterprise' applications as well, although I think there will remain a lot of use cases where an explicit save will be needed for whatever reason. Let's keep talking about this. I need to do some research on the memento pattern first :-) If you have any information sources you can point me to, I would greatly appreciate that. Kind regards, Jonathan van Alteren Founding Member | Object Guild jvalteren(a)objectguild.com On 9 Oct 2019, 16:49 +0200, jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de <jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de>, wrote: > > This is a tricky mine field. Sometimes you need a lot of business functionality in objects referenced in your objects that are currently in the editor. So I'm still to see a project in which the memento pattern really worked for more complex scenarios. How deep do you dive to have enough memento objects to provide the functionality needed. I guess you can do that with some sort of object-level transaction framework that automatically creates mementos of whatever object is being navigated to during some kind of processing-context. I guess slots could be of use here. But this is not trivial for general cases. > In my experience, this problem area makes for the other 70% of the time spent on developing GUI or Web applications, besides the 60% for GUI design and implementation and 25% business logic... > I'd be interested to learn about patterns to handle such more complex things. We constantly travel back and forth between implementing stuff in the GUI handlers (copying values to the GUI classes that access themselves during GUI operations and push values to the business objects when the users clicks on OK), using mementos (which most of the times are nets of mementos that are created manually - "we know what we'll touch in this Editor") and operating on business objects directly and relying on the persistence mechanism (Glorp in our case) and its rollback behaviour. All three have lots of weaknesses and seem to have their place nevertheless. > So this is a very interesting discussion and I think this is an area that has not been solved yet. > > Joachim > > > > > > > Am 09.10.19 um 16:25 schrieb James Foster: > > Thanks for the explanation. And, yes, this is an artifact of your design; if you put intermediate values into domain objects then they will remain in your domain objects to be seen later. From what youâve described, I donât see how it would be any different in a non-image environment (Java, C#, etc.), unless you re-read the entire object graph from the database. As someone else mentioned, this would be a good place for the Memento Pattern. > > > > James > > > > > On Oct 9, 2019, at 1:59 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com> wrote: > > > > > > Hi James, > > > > > > I see how my explanation might be unclear. > > > > > > We have a main form for the agenda and a subform for an item, which is shown using Seaside call/answer. The save button of the subform is clicked, which adds the item to the underlying agenda model object, but the save button of the main form is notÂ clicked by the user. The callback for the main save button sends the save message to the agenda object, causing the database to be updated. > > > > > > So yes, the browser does submit the data on the subform, it's the main form component that doesn't receive the save button callback. I realize that this is in large part an issue with our design. However, the way object persistence seems to work in the image environment plays a large role. > > > > > > > > > Kind regards, > > > > > > Jonathan van Alteren > > > > > > Founding Member | Object Guild > > > jvalteren(a)objectguild.com > > > On 8 Oct 2019, 15:41 +0200, James Foster <Smalltalk(a)jgfoster.net>, wrote: > > > > > > > > > On Oct 8, 2019, at 3:05 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com> wrote: > > > > > > > > > > We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved. > > > > > > > > Here is what I donât understand: how did the change get from the userâs client agent (browser) to the server? If you make a change to a field in a form and then close the browser, who sent the change to the server? If you show the save domain value in a different location, with a dynamically-generated id and name (so it isnât cached in the browser), or written to the Pharo Transcript, does the value still change? That is, are you sure that the change is in the reflected in the Smalltalk image and not just somehow cached in the browser? > > > > > > > > James > > > > > > > > > > > > -- > ----------------------------------------------------------------------- > Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de > Fliederweg 1 http://www.objektfabrik.de > D-71640 Ludwigsburg http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com > Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0 Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1 > >

Oct. 10, 2019

Re: [Pharo-users] voyage mongo and transactionality

by Jonathan van Alteren

Hi James, Thank you for your feedback. If I remember correctly, in Java a persistence framework like JPA/Hibernate would track 'dirty' objects somehow and handle caching together with transaction management. There might be some things we might apply from those frameworks in Pharo/Smalltalk. However, our challenge is that we don't have much time to look at this because we need it to develop customer applications ;-) I will look into the Memento Pattern, thanks! Kind regards, Jonathan van Alteren Founding Member | Object Guild jvalteren(a)objectguild.com On 9 Oct 2019, 16:26 +0200, James Foster <Smalltalk(a)jgfoster.net>, wrote: > Thanks for the explanation. And, yes, this is an artifact of your design; if you put intermediate values into domain objects then they will remain in your domain objects to be seen later. From what youâve described, I donât see how it would be any different in a non-image environment (Java, C#, etc.), unless you re-read the entire object graph from the database. As someone else mentioned, this would be a good place for the Memento Pattern. > > James > > > On Oct 9, 2019, at 1:59 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com> wrote: > > > > Hi James, > > > > I see how my explanation might be unclear. > > > > We have a main form for the agenda and a subform for an item, which is shown using Seaside call/answer. The save button of the subform is clicked, which adds the item to the underlying agenda model object, but the save button of the main form is notÂ clicked by the user. The callback for the main save button sends the save message to the agenda object, causing the database to be updated. > > > > So yes, the browser does submit the data on the subform, it's the main form component that doesn't receive the save button callback. I realize that this is in large part an issue with our design. However, the way object persistence seems to work in the image environment plays a large role. > > > > > > Kind regards, > > > > Jonathan van Alteren > > > > Founding Member | Object Guild > > jvalteren(a)objectguild.com > > On 8 Oct 2019, 15:41 +0200, James Foster <Smalltalk(a)jgfoster.net>, wrote: > > > > > > > On Oct 8, 2019, at 3:05 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com> wrote: > > > > > > > > We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved. > > > > > > Here is what I donât understand: how did the change get from the userâs client agent (browser) to the server? If you make a change to a field in a form and then close the browser, who sent the change to the server? If you show the save domain value in a different location, with a dynamically-generated id and name (so it isnât cached in the browser), or written to the Pharo Transcript, does the value still change? That is, are you sure that the change is in the reflected in the Smalltalk image and not just somehow cached in the browser? > > > > > > James > > > > > > >

Oct. 10, 2019

Re: [Pharo-users] voyage mongo and transactionality

by Jonathan van Alteren

Hi Estaban, Thanks for your feedback. I agree that there might not be any real problem with Voyage. And yes, I think it was some kind of in-memory transaction handling that is was looking for. Can you explain a bit more about how the cache in Voyage works and why it is the way it is? The application in question doesn't have a lot of users, so changes are we could do without caching and still have good performance. I was used to working with JPA/Hibernate in Java, which doesn't seem to have the issue that we run into. Any idea why it works differently with Voyage/MongoDB? Is that because MongoDB doesn't support database transactions, hence missing a good trigger to flush the cache? Making copies of domain model objects somehow 'feels wrong'. When I have a person in my CRM domain, I feel strongly that it should always ever be represented by 1 object instance of class Person. The search continues... :-) Kind regards, Jonathan van Alteren Founding Member | Object Guild jvalteren(a)objectguild.com On 8 Oct 2019, 12:54 +0200, Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm(a)gmail.com>, wrote: > Hi, > > That looks a lot more like a Seaside mishandling than a problem with Voyage itself. > > > On 8 Oct 2019, at 12:05, Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com> wrote: > > > > Hello all, > > > > We are having some issues with using Voyage/Mongo for a customer project that I'd like to get your feedback on. > > > > The customer application is a form based business web application using Seaside with object persistence using Voyage with MongoDB on Pharo 7.0. The application is deployed on a dedicated Linux production server running MongoDB version 4.2. > > > > The application is used to manage meeting agendas and minutes. After opening the agenda view of a future meeting, the user can add an item to the agenda by clicking a button. This calls an item editor component which answers when a Save or Cancel button is clicked. The agenda view component itself also has a Save button, which performs a Voyage save of the object aggregate (agenda + items). > > > > We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved. > > > > It does not matter if we select the agenda aggregate object instance using Voyage or access it in a different way. Changes to the state of the object are retained, even though a Voyage save was never sent to the agenda instance. The cause seems to be that the Voyage repository caches the object instance and thus on select, it returns an object that is in a different state than how it was persisted. > > > > This all seems to come down to object transactionality. > > > > We have a need to 'cancel' changes made to an object instance. Before working with Pharo/Smalltalk in a non-image based environment, I was used to do this by retrieving the original object from persistence again. This also allowed for a convenient way to detect changes to an object's state, which we are missing at the moment too. > > In Voyage, new objects are just persisted (hence they enter the cache) once you do the first âsaveâ. > Retrieved objects are indeed in the cache, and since there is just one copy for Pharo instance, if you do an update of a property (even if you do not save), the cached instance will have the new attribute value, since there is no in-memory transaction handling in Voyage. > > Which means: you need to handle it by your self. One solution is to work on a copy and on âsaveâ flush the changes before (it is easy to develop methods to automatise this). > > Well, something like that :) > > > > > We know that moving to GemStone can help us with these issues, but our current planning of customer projects does not allow us to do this within the next 3 months. And we really need to find a way to tackle these issues . > > Well, not really, you will still need to copy modified values, retrieve new and apply your changes. > Of course if you want to discard possible in-memory changes, yes, you can cancel the transaction in gemstoneâ¦ and you can also re-read the object in Voyage (no special api for that, even if we could add itâ¦ you need to re-execute a query for it). > > Esteban > > > > > > > Your feedback is greatly appreciated! > > > > > > > > Kind regards, > > > > > > Jonathan van Alteren > > > > Founding Member | Object Guild > > jvalteren(a)objectguild.com > > > >

Oct. 10, 2019

Re: [Pharo-users] voyage mongo and transactionality

by Jonathan van Alteren

Hi Norbert, Thank you very much for your extensive answer. For starters, we would be happy to have an option available for the course grained handling that you mention. I'd be interested to hear if there are any options besides GemStone available to be used with Voyage/MongoDB. Your mention of the Mongo cache being a weak dictionary is very interesting, I did not know that (it doesn't seem to be documented). Yes, the Seaside sessions seem to be the path through which these objects remain referenced. When I inspect all instances of our session class, I see old session objects hanging around that still reference our root application component with the rendering tree containing various references to our domain model objects. Can you tell me why the session objects don't get garbage collected? Should we manually clean up our session object somehow? I must admit I'm a bit out of my comfort zone here, after working in Java for close to 20 years ;-) We explicitly don't want to use any relational databases for our own application (perhaps only for integrating with customer data). I still haven't fully integrated the conceptual differences in my mental model, about how to work with objects in an image based/object persistence environment. I did look into using a Voyage repository filter, which is mentioned (or buried deep I should say ;-)) in this post:Â https://pharoweekly.wordpress.com/2017/02/20/consortium-action-13-17-feb/. What if we were to use a dynamic variable like this for each session instance? Then at least each user will have her/his own cache. But that doesn't answer the need for a kind of rollback mechanism within the same Voyage cache/session. And then there is your comment about potentially having multiple copies of an identical object... I wonder what patterns other Seaside 'enterprise' application developers are using. You are right, the term object transactionality doesn't make much sense ;-) We are not using Magritte (and probably won't). I don't know much about Magritte, but it feels like it might be incompatible with the behavioral, 'pure' object approach that we want to use. However, I am interested to investigate. Can you recommend any good documentation sources for learning Magritte from an application architecture perspective? Also, I'm interested to hear more about the modification tracking approach you are working on. Please drop me a personal note if you are willing to collaborate on this. Kind regards, Jonathan van Alteren Founding Member | Object Guild jvalteren(a)objectguild.com On 8 Oct 2019, 12:54 +0200, Norbert Hartl <norbert(a)hartl.name>, wrote: > Hi, > > > Am 08.10.2019 um 12:05 schrieb Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com>: > > > > Hello all, > > > > We are having some issues with using Voyage/Mongo for a customer project that I'd like to get your feedback on. > > > > The customer application is a form based business web application using Seaside with object persistence using Voyage with MongoDB on Pharo 7.0. The application is deployed on a dedicated Linux production server running MongoDB version 4.2. > > > > The application is used to manage meeting agendas and minutes. After opening the agenda view of a future meeting, the user can add an item to the agenda by clicking a button. This calls an item editor component which answers when a Save or Cancel button is clicked. The agenda view component itself also has a Save button, which performs a Voyage save of the object aggregate (agenda + items). > > > > We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved. > > > > It does not matter if we select the agenda aggregate object instance using Voyage or access it in a different way. Changes to the state of the object are retained, even though a Voyage save was never sent to the agenda instance. The cause seems to be that the Voyage repository caches the object instance and thus on select, it returns an object that is in a different state than how it was persisted. > > > > This all seems to come down to object transactionality. > > > > We have a need to 'cancel' changes made to an object instance. Before working with Pharo/Smalltalk in a non-image based environment, I was used to do this by retrieving the original object from persistence again. This also allowed for a convenient way to detect changes to an object's state, which we are missing at the moment too. > > > > We know that moving to GemStone can help us with these issues, but our current planning of customer projects does not allow us to do this within the next 3 months. And we really need to find a way to tackle these issues . > > > > > > Your feedback is greatly appreciated! > > > this is none to be confusing to a lot of people. If you map a memory object graph to a database there are no intrinsic points of transactions unless you put them into your application model. Gemstone or any transaction based handling wonât help you if your use case is not as coarse grained as discarding all modified data and not just some. Or you need to hop into nested transactions which are supported by Gemstone IMHO but there is rules to care about, too, if you want to use them. > > Regarding your application you modify data and this is kept. The cache in mongo is a weak dictionary. This means that if you get the object with the changes a second time it means these objects are referenced somewhere. Seaside sessions seems to be the obvious thing here. If you have a reachable object (e.g. server singleton -> handler -> seaside -> seaside session -> business object) then mongo keeps the object in its cache because it needs to be able to establish identity on further queries. Ein emoving all the changes from an object you keep in memory wouldnât be really good if the persistence layer would do it. > > The problem is obvious but the solution is not. We could make the cache session or request based which would circumvent the problem. But if an object would be attached to something outside the session/request which you cannot forbid it causes real problems like multiple copies to an identical object. > > I donât know what you mean with object transactionality because it makes no sense in my head. But you have basically two approaches to solve the problem. If you would use magritte you would have it at hand. There each UI component gets just a memento of the business object for modification. You need to commit the UI component in order to modify the business object. So you can commit on user interaction and separately on persistence which allows a huge set of use cases. > The other one Iâm working on since a while is a proper modification tracking. In this you change the objects directly but have a registry with the dirty objects which you can act upon. I have a sample modification tracker that uses readOnly object write barrier for objects. On write attempt it registers the object and the write operation as command pattern. You can undo modifications of a single object where all commmands are undone on that object. Or you abort all modifications at once. It is basically working but has the problems on concurrent access. As the mongo cache is image wide two concurrent requests interfere with each other. > So you can see that the problem is not that easy to solve. > > TL;DR a memento approach might your best and cleanest option right now. > > Norbert > > > > Kind regards, > > > > > > Jonathan van Alteren > > > > Founding Member | Object Guild > > jvalteren(a)objectguild.com > > > >

Oct. 10, 2019

Re: [Pharo-users] voyage mongo and transactionality

by PBKResearch

It may be irrelevant, but I have been playing recently with OmniBase, which is a fully object-oriented database system, now over 20 years old, but it still works very well for my uses. David GoriÅ¡ek, the author, claims that it has ACID properties. From my reading, updates operate on a proxy object, which is not written to the database until an explicit commit is given. A second transaction accessing the same object will still see the original until the change is committed. What happens to a proxy which is never committed is not clear, but if GoriÅ¡ek is right, the stored data can never be contaminated. I think a proxy in this sense is equivalent to a memento. Thanks to Esteban Lorenzano, OmniBase is now available on Pharo. The code is ancient, there is no documentation and obviously no support, but it might be worth while for someone to try some software archaeology and put it to use. I have found it possible to create and maintain a small database of natural language information, and access is fairly quick and easy â and itâs all Smalltalk. It claims to store all kinds of Smalltalk objects, except block closures, and skimming through the code it seems to incorporate a serializer similar to Fuel. The only documentation I have found is a slideshow at https://www.slideshare.net/esug/omni-baseobjectdatabase. I have found out a few things about it, if anyone is interested. Peter Kenny From: Pharo-users <pharo-users-bounces(a)lists.pharo.org> On Behalf Of Norbert Hartl Sent: 09 October 2019 18:08 To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] voyage mongo and transactionality Am 09.10.2019 um 16:48 schrieb "jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de <mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de> " <jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de <mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de> >: This is a tricky mine field. Sometimes you need a lot of business functionality in objects referenced in your objects that are currently in the editor. So I'm still to see a project in which the memento pattern really worked for more complex scenarios. How deep do you dive to have enough memento objects to provide the functionality needed. I guess you can do that with some sort of object-level transaction framework that automatically creates mementos of whatever object is being navigated to during some kind of processing-context. I guess slots could be of use here. But this is not trivial for general cases. Yes it is tricky. You can have copies of business objects but you have always references to the business objects not pointing to the copy. And you need to know which objects should be tracked. In Gemstone IIRC it is easy as it is the time the object is copied from the stone to the gem it is registered in the current transaction. So you can check it and committing if it changed because you have to write it back. The important point here might be get noticed when a reference is acquired. In pharo it is not that easy but could be done if object would be reified and interceptable. In my experience, this problem area makes for the other 70% of the time spent on developing GUI or Web applications, besides the 60% for GUI design and implementation and 25% business logic... 70% + 60% + 25% + 30% = 185% sounds indeed very realistic if it comes to project planning. ðThere is even a rule saying that for the first 90% of the project you need the first 90% of time and for the last 10% of the project you need the second 90% of time. I'd be interested to learn about patterns to handle such more complex things. We constantly travel back and forth between implementing stuff in the GUI handlers (copying values to the GUI classes that access themselves during GUI operations and push values to the business objects when the users clicks on OK), using mementos (which most of the times are nets of mementos that are created manually - "we know what we'll touch in this Editor") and operating on business objects directly and relying on the persistence mechanism (Glorp in our case) and its rollback behaviour. All three have lots of weaknesses and seem to have their place nevertheless. So this is a very interesting discussion and I think this is an area that has not been solved yet. I think it isnât solved and I find every piece of information about it very interesting. Norbert Joachim Am 09.10.19 um 16:25 schrieb James Foster: Thanks for the explanation. And, yes, this is an artifact of your design; if you put intermediate values into domain objects then they will remain in your domain objects to be seen later. From what youâve described, I donât see how it would be any different in a non-image environment (Java, C#, etc.), unless you re-read the entire object graph from the database. As someone else mentioned, this would be a good place for the Memento Pattern. James On Oct 9, 2019, at 1:59 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com <mailto:jvalteren@objectguild.com> > wrote: Hi James, I see how my explanation might be unclear. We have a main form for the agenda and a subform for an item, which is shown using Seaside call/answer. The save button of the subform is clicked, which adds the item to the underlying agenda model object, but the save button of the main form is not clicked by the user. The callback for the main save button sends the save message to the agenda object, causing the database to be updated. So yes, the browser does submit the data on the subform, it's the main form component that doesn't receive the save button callback. I realize that this is in large part an issue with our design. However, the way object persistence seems to work in the image environment plays a large role. Kind regards, Jonathan van Alteren Founding Member | Object Guild jvalteren(a)objectguild.com <mailto:jvalteren@objectguild.com> On 8 Oct 2019, 15:41 +0200, James Foster <Smalltalk(a)jgfoster.net <mailto:Smalltalk@jgfoster.net> >, wrote: On Oct 8, 2019, at 3:05 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com <mailto:jvalteren@objectguild.com> > wrote: We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved. Here is what I donât understand: how did the change get from the userâs client agent (browser) to the server? If you make a change to a field in a form and then close the browser, who sent the change to the server? If you show the save domain value in a different location, with a dynamically-generated id and name (so it isnât cached in the browser), or written to the Pharo Transcript, does the value still change? That is, are you sure that the change is in the reflected in the Smalltalk image and not just somehow cached in the browser? James -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de Fliederweg 1 http://www.objektfabrik.de D-71640 Ludwigsburg http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0 Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1

Oct. 9, 2019