October 2020 - Pharo-users - lists.pharo.org

Re: Easiest light weight cloud/web persistence for Pharo?

by Esteban Maringolo

Hi Pierce, On Mon, Oct 5, 2020 at 10:22 PM Pierce Ng <pierce(a)samadhiweb.com> wrote: > On Mon, Oct 05, 2020 at 11:23:25PM +0100, Tim Mackinnon wrote: > Many options. Great time sinks. :-) Have fun. > > <snipped options> > - Choose Boring Technology - http://boringtechnology.club/ This made my day. Thank you :-) Esteban A. Maringolo

Oct. 6, 2020

[Offtopic] Documentary Project

by Eric Gade

Fellow Squeakers and Pharo-ers, Please forgive me if this message is inappropriate for the list. I am hoping you all will be interested in the following project. For the past year and a half I have been working on a team that is developing a documentary <https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/messagenotunderstood/message-not-under…> on the history of personal computing. Our goal is to interview the very people who laid the foundations for personal computing while they are still with us, learning about their original visions and getting their take on the present. In this sense it is both an aspiring feature length documentary project but also an endeavor in oral history and posterity. Many of the themes we want to explore will be familiar to the members of this community (as will the title). Last fall we were able to shoot our first three interviews. We used these to make a short teaser <https://vimeo.com/429045920>, with the idea it could be used to raise funds for future rounds of interviews. That said, we are currently in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign <https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/messagenotunderstood/message-not-under…> to get the second round funded. If you are interested in learning more, feel free to reach out to me directly and to visit the film's campaign site <https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/messagenotunderstood/message-not-under…> and website <https://messagenotunderstood.com/>. We need all the promotion we can get! Thanks! -- Eric

Oct. 6, 2020

Re: Easiest light weight cloud/web persistence for Pharo?

by Sean P. DeNigris

jtuchel wrote > Sigh. Forget about the idea that it will be easy to switch your > persistence later....I am not commenting on SimplePersistence here, I > don't even know what it > does or doesn't. Joachim, Thanks for this interesting perspective. I've never had the (mis?!)fortune of a project growing enough to force me to make those tough choices! For SimplePersistence I will say that I view it as a way to *delay* making *any* choices until you are forced to. It's really just a layer of sugar on top of Fuel (it used to use the old school Squeak equivalent serialization mechanism - I forget the name and that might still work). You tell it what classes to serialize. Implement two methods for each class that get and set the data, and then it saves the whole thing as one object graph. Tim, If you use SimplePersistence, please keep me posted about your experience. I'm happy to help. NB I have maintained and extended the library, but it is the work of Ramon Leon ----- Cheers, Sean -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

Oct. 6, 2020

Re: Easiest light weight cloud/web persistence for Pharo?

by jtuchel＠objektfabrik.de

Tim, Am 06.10.20 um 14:47 schrieb Tim Mackinnon: > Some great answers everyone - really appreciate it. > > I think that all things considered, SimplePersistence seems like a > very easy place to start, and then I can "upgrade" when my super > awesome idea (not), exceeds its bounds. Sigh. Forget about the idea that it will be easy to switch your persistence later. There are lots of little (and not so little) things to consider for each approach, be it an ORM, an object database or just a bunch of serialized objects. It starts with the bookkeeping for references between objects. Is it enough to remove an object from a Collection or will it somehow survive in your db and come back as a surprise after you started a new transction? Will a deleted object be deleted or just unreachable? Do I have to care about all possible paths to this object if I really want it to be deleted? Will my ORB possible re-insert it in the next transaction because I don't understand how an ORM works? Don't fool yourself into thinking there is something like a transparent persistence layer. If anybody ever says so, walk away, say thank you and forget about that person as fast as you can. I am not commenting on SimplePersistence here, I don't even know what it does or doesn't. I am talking about experiences made with both OODBs and ORMs like Glorp. I've been through tough times with an architecture that I thought to be a good idea: keep persistence in a separate layer that just spits out objects and swallows new or changed ones. Works well in a prototype. But on top of Glorp and with a few more than a hand full of objects, you end up wanting to write real database queries. So you need to get a hold of something that represents the database, say a Session object. You end up either trying to wrapper the query building in your clever layer and end up with friggin slow performance or give up on your nice layering to make your application at least bearable. Sometimes you even give up navigating between objects and replace a simple getter with a DB query to get good performance (ever waited for 600 proxies in a collection to each deserialize itself when accessing the #items of your Stock object? - you better write a sql query fetching them all at once...) You need query by example? Good luck in an Object DB. You either use DB specific queries and hand-tuned indices, or you navigate your object net and have the user wait a little. Or you design your object model around the search paths (which is hard once your model has evolved a while). In Mongo/Voyage, you need to make a decision of what objects will always be tied closely together (referenced by a root) and can be retrieved on their own. You think in object trees rather than objects. We've thrown CouchDB out of our project. Not because it is a bad NoSQL database, but because we couldn't make it work well in our overall architecture in which the primary store is a relational Database. So please be aware that once your app gets a little more than just a prototype, you need to make a decision: relational, dictinaries, tree-like I guess this is not really helpful advice. I can't really tell you what is right. I am cursing at Glorp every few days, but I also love it for many great things it does for us. And I've had a few very "interesting" lessons along the way, and am still in the process of learning about its limits. Joachim > > I wonder if these answers should go somewhere in a tips section > somewhere, and get updated yearly. > > @jonathan I had forgotten about those server tools - I think the last > time I did something it predated some earlier tips the Sven had given, > so will check it out. Back then, I did have a GitLab build pipeline > autodeploying for me, so I'm hoping I can re-incarnate all of that so > I can get my little app running with no fuss... lets see. > > While I have a love/hate with Docker - I did wonder if there was > something for Pharo that just let me build my image into a container > and then it would just work with little system knowledge needed (as I > keep forgetting all the voodoo between times when I need it). Maybe > there is, or maybe it might come one day soon... > > Tim > > On Tue, 6 Oct 2020, at 9:40 AM, Jonathan van Alteren wrote: >> Hi Tim, >> >> I've been running Seaside applications on Hetzner cloud servers for >> more than a year now, with great pleasure and success: >> https://www.hetzner.com/cloud >> I guess their servers are similar to Digital Ocean, although I >> haven't followed the development of their products and solutions for >> quite a while. Setting up a new server at Hetzner is a breeze, and >> you can start already for as low as â¬2,49 per month! >> >> We're using Voyage on MongoDB for persistence. After learning some >> hard lessons (and I'm sure there are more to come ;-)), I really >> enjoy the unobtrusiveness of it. Most of the time, it doesn't require >> much attention and allows me to add persistence to real OO designs >> quickly and easily. I find it a welcome change from the relational >> database work I used to (need to) do, back when I was still doing >> Java. The 'everything an object' principle of Pharo/Smalltalk really >> makes it shine. >> >> I can't help you with a list of tradeoffs though. If you come across >> a set of arguments, I'd be happy to give feedback. >> >> By the way, I forked Sven's pharo-server-tools project (here: >> https://github.com/objectguild/pharo-server-tools) and have a routine >> going that suits me well enough. Still lots of room for improvement, >> but it's OK for my current needs. >> >> Future plans are to use the Hetzner API to provision a new server and >> use something like Chef or Ansible to install/configure it >> automatically to be ready to deploy a Seaside application. I'd like >> to integrate this into a full service CI/CD pipeline in the future, >> to be able to do automated production deployments without service >> interruption if possible. For this scenario, I would really also like >> to switch to using GemStone for persistence. >> >> Hope this helps! Let me know what you decide and I might be able to >> help with some technical stuff. >> >> Kind regards, >> >> Jonathan van Alteren >> >> Founding Member | Object Guild B.V. >> /Sustainable Software for Purpose-Driven Organizations/ >> >> jvalteren(a)objectguild.com >> On 6 Oct 2020, 00:23 +0200, Tim Mackinnon <tim(a)testit.works>, wrote: >> >>> Hi everyone - Iâm wondering what is the recommended way to save some >>> simple user data for a Pharo application I would like to run on the >>> cloud (probably initially digital ocean, but could be AWS if it came >>> to it). >>> >>> Initially I thought I might try and run my little app in Digital >>> ocean (I followed someoneâs steps a few years ago, and had a simple >>> seaside app running quite well) - so I was thinking of starting there. >>> >>> I know there is Svenâs P3 - but Iâm not sure Iâm ready to run and >>> maintain a SQL database for a simple application, but could be >>> persuaded it its simple to setup with little maintenance. Would >>> mongo be a suggestion - is that easy to setup and run? (And is that >>> Voyage?). >>> >>> Possibly I could even use image persistence, and fuel out a >>> Dictionary from time to time - but I think that might be a little >>> bit too belt and braces for me. >>> >>> Is there something that gives a little table of tradeoffs with some >>> simple ways to get started? >>> >>> Tim > -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. 6, 2020

Re: Easiest light weight cloud/web persistence for Pharo?

by Tim Mackinnon

Some great answers everyone - really appreciate it. I think that all things considered, SimplePersistence seems like a very easy place to start, and then I can "upgrade" when my super awesome idea (not), exceeds its bounds. I wonder if these answers should go somewhere in a tips section somewhere, and get updated yearly. @jonathan I had forgotten about those server tools - I think the last time I did something it predated some earlier tips the Sven had given, so will check it out. Back then, I did have a GitLab build pipeline autodeploying for me, so I'm hoping I can re-incarnate all of that so I can get my little app running with no fuss... lets see. While I have a love/hate with Docker - I did wonder if there was something for Pharo that just let me build my image into a container and then it would just work with little system knowledge needed (as I keep forgetting all the voodoo between times when I need it). Maybe there is, or maybe it might come one day soon... Tim On Tue, 6 Oct 2020, at 9:40 AM, Jonathan van Alteren wrote: > Hi Tim, > > I've been running Seaside applications on Hetzner cloud servers for more than a year now, with great pleasure and success: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud > I guess their servers are similar to Digital Ocean, although I haven't followed the development of their products and solutions for quite a while. Setting up a new server at Hetzner is a breeze, and you can start already for as low as â¬2,49 per month! > > We're using Voyage on MongoDB for persistence. After learning some hard lessons (and I'm sure there are more to come ;-)), I really enjoy the unobtrusiveness of it. Most of the time, it doesn't require much attention and allows me to add persistence to real OO designs quickly and easily. I find it a welcome change from the relational database work I used to (need to) do, back when I was still doing Java. The 'everything an object' principle of Pharo/Smalltalk really makes it shine. > > I can't help you with a list of tradeoffs though. If you come across a set of arguments, I'd be happy to give feedback. > > By the way, I forked Sven's pharo-server-tools project (here: https://github.com/objectguild/pharo-server-tools) and have a routine going that suits me well enough. Still lots of room for improvement, but it's OK for my current needs. > > Future plans are to use the Hetzner API to provision a new server and use something like Chef or Ansible to install/configure it automatically to be ready to deploy a Seaside application. I'd like to integrate this into a full service CI/CD pipeline in the future, to be able to do automated production deployments without service interruption if possible. For this scenario, I would really also like to switch to using GemStone for persistence. > > Hope this helps! Let me know what you decide and I might be able to help with some technical stuff. > > Kind regards, > > Jonathan van Alteren > > Founding Member | Object Guild B.V. > *Sustainable Software for Purpose-Driven Organizations* > > jvalteren(a)objectguild.com > On 6 Oct 2020, 00:23 +0200, Tim Mackinnon <tim(a)testit.works>, wrote: > >> Hi everyone - Iâm wondering what is the recommended way to save some simple user data for a Pharo application I would like to run on the cloud (probably initially digital ocean, but could be AWS if it came to it). >> >> Initially I thought I might try and run my little app in Digital ocean (I followed someoneâs steps a few years ago, and had a simple seaside app running quite well) - so I was thinking of starting there. >> >> I know there is Svenâs P3 - but Iâm not sure Iâm ready to run and maintain a SQL database for a simple application, but could be persuaded it its simple to setup with little maintenance. Would mongo be a suggestion - is that easy to setup and run? (And is that Voyage?). >> >> Possibly I could even use image persistence, and fuel out a Dictionary from time to time - but I think that might be a little bit too belt and braces for me. >> >> Is there something that gives a little table of tradeoffs with some simple ways to get started? >> >> Tim

Oct. 6, 2020

Re: Energy efficiency of Pharo/Smalltalk

by Jonathan van Alteren

Hi Mariano, Thanks for your response! I will take a look at the presentation. I was hoping for some more concrete experience with the Green Software Lab benchmark. It's not a priority at the moment, but hopefully I'll get back to this in the near future. I'll report back with any findings. Kind regards, Jonathan van Alteren Founding Member | Object Guild B.V. Sustainable Software for Purpose-Driven Organizations jvalteren(a)objectguild.com On 1 Oct 2020, 22:34 +0200, Mariano Martinez Peck <marianopeck(a)gmail.com>, wrote: > > Hi there, > > We did a related experiment with VA Smalltalk and other languages like Python, Java, etc... the context was how a JIT compiler can also help you reduce energy consumption...which could be very important for IoT. We did experiments on a Raspberry Pi, run some benchmarks and with some hardware tool we were measuring the wattage. > > You can see the whole presentation here:Â https://youtu.be/2xO0ohUNnug > > Hopefully this can get you started with Pharo experiments. > > Cheers, > > > On Thu, Oct 1, 2020 at 8:47 AM Jonathan van Alteren <jvalteren(a)objectguild.com> wrote: > > > Hi all, > > > > > > I am interested in energy efficiency metrics for Pharo (version >=8). Just now, I came across this research and related GitHub project: > > > > > > â¢ https://sites.google.com/view/energy-efficiency-languages > > > â¢ https://github.com/greensoftwarelab/Energy-Languages > > > > > > > > > Unfortunately, the paper mentions that Smalltalk was excluded from the results because the (VW) compiler was proprietary :-S However, the GitHub repository does contain Smalltalk code and results, but I haven't been able to evaluate those. > > > > > > [1] Does anyone here have more information on this topic? > > > > > > > > > The benchmarks seem to be low-level algorithms. Although that is useful, I think that a better argument for Pharo/Smalltalk efficiency is that a good OO design (e.g. created using responsibility-driven design with behaviorally complete objects) will be a better fit, can be much simpler and will thus be more efficient during development, as well as easier to maintain and evolve. > > > > > > [2] Has anyone done any research in this area that can quantify this aspect? > > > > > > Kind regards, > > > > > > Jonathan van Alteren > > > > > > Founding Member | Object Guild B.V. > > > Sustainable Software for Purpose-Driven Organizations > > > > > > jvalteren(a)objectguild.com > > > -- > Mariano Martinez Peck > Email: marianopeck(a)gmail.com > Twitter: @MartinezPeck > LinkedIn:Â www.linkedin.com/in/mariano-martinez-peck > Blog:Â https://marianopeck.wordpress.com/

Oct. 6, 2020

Re: Easiest light weight cloud/web persistence for Pharo?

by Jonathan van Alteren

Hi Tim, I've been running Seaside applications on Hetzner cloud servers for more than a year now, with great pleasure and success:Â https://www.hetzner.com/cloud I guess their servers are similar to Digital Ocean, although I haven't followed the development of their products and solutions for quite a while. Setting up a new server at Hetzner is a breeze, and you can start already for as low as â¬2,49 per month! We're using Voyage on MongoDB for persistence. After learning some hard lessons (and I'm sure there are more to come ;-)), I really enjoy the unobtrusiveness of it. Most of the time, it doesn't require much attention and allows me to add persistence to real OO designs quickly and easily. I find it a welcome change from the relational database work I used to (need to) do, back when I was still doing Java. The 'everything an object' principle of Pharo/Smalltalk really makes it shine. I can't help you with a list of tradeoffs though. If you come across a set of arguments, I'd be happy to give feedback. By the way, I forked Sven's pharo-server-tools project (here:Â https://github.com/objectguild/pharo-server-tools) and have a routine going that suits me well enough. Still lots of room for improvement, but it's OK for my current needs. Future plans are to use the Hetzner API to provision a new server and use something like Chef or Ansible to install/configure it automatically to be ready to deploy a Seaside application. I'd like to integrate this into a full service CI/CD pipeline in the future, to be able to do automated production deployments without service interruption if possible. For this scenario, I would really also like to switch to using GemStone for persistence. Hope this helps! Let me know what you decide and I might be able to help with some technical stuff. Kind regards, Jonathan van Alteren Founding Member | Object Guild B.V. Sustainable Software for Purpose-Driven Organizations jvalteren(a)objectguild.com On 6 Oct 2020, 00:23 +0200, Tim Mackinnon <tim(a)testit.works>, wrote: > Hi everyone - Iâm wondering what is the recommended way to save some simple user data for a Pharo application I would like to run on the cloud (probably initially digital ocean, but could be AWS if it came to it). > > Initially I thought I might try and run my little app in Digital ocean (I followed someoneâs steps a few years ago, and had a simple seaside app running quite well) - so I was thinking of starting there. > > I know there is Svenâs P3 - but Iâm not sure Iâm ready to run and maintain a SQL database for a simple application, but could be persuaded it its simple to setup with little maintenance. Would mongo be a suggestion - is that easy to setup and run? (And is that Voyage?). > > Possibly I could even use image persistence, and fuel out a Dictionary from time to time - but I think that might be a little bit too belt and braces for me. > > Is there something that gives a little table of tradeoffs with some simple ways to get started? > > Tim

Oct. 6, 2020

Re: Easiest light weight cloud/web persistence for Pharo?

by Pierce Ng

On Mon, Oct 05, 2020 at 11:23:25PM +0100, Tim Mackinnon wrote: > I know there is Svenâs P3 - but Iâm not sure Iâm ready to run and > maintain a SQL database for a simple application, but could be > persuaded it its simple to setup with little maintenance. Would mongo > be a suggestion - is that easy to setup and run? (And is that > Voyage?). > > Possibly I could even use image persistence, and fuel out a Dictionary > from time to time - but I think that might be a little bit too belt > and braces for me. Hi Tim, If you are familiar with Docker then starting a database server is easy that way. Assuming you pick a 'boring' product then what matters for your app is the quality of the database interface code on Pharo for that product. For PostgreSQL and MySQL no problem. I've not used Mongo itself nor Voyage so no comment. If you neither want to run a separate database server nor roll your own writing out to Fuel etc, then you're looking at 'embedded' databases. For pure Smalltalk, Omnibase or SimplePersistence. If you are ok with something that uses FFI, then SQLite, Unqlite and probably others. Personally I'd choose SQLite because it is boring - ubiquitous, high quality, and importantly unlike the pure Smalltalk and many embedded key-value databases there is a plethora of external tools that operate on SQLite databases which will help your debugging. For SQL databases you can also use an ORM like Glorp or ReStore. Finally there are also NoSQL-as-a-service like Google Firebase. Many options. Great time sinks. :-) Have fun. - PostgreSQL - https://github.com/svenvc/p3 - MySQL - https://github.com/pharo-rdbms/Pharo-MySQL - Omnibase - https://github.com/sebastianconcept/OmniBase - SimplePersistence - https://github.com/seandenigris/Simple-Persistence - SQLite - https://github.com/pharo-rdbms/Pharo-SQLite3 - Unqlite - https://github.com/mumez/PunQLite - Glorp - https://github.com/pharo-rdbms/glorp - ReStore - https://github.com/rko281/ReStoreForPharo - Firebase - https://github.com/psvensson/firebase-st - Choose Boring Technology - http://boringtechnology.club/ Pierce

Oct. 6, 2020

Re: Easiest light weight cloud/web persistence for Pharo?

by Gabriel Cotelli

Maybe you can use SQlite3 in a persistent volume? On Mon, Oct 5, 2020, 19:23 Tim Mackinnon <tim(a)testit.works> wrote: > Hi everyone - Iâm wondering what is the recommended way to save some > simple user data for a Pharo application I would like to run on the cloud > (probably initially digital ocean, but could be AWS if it came to it). > > Initially I thought I might try and run my little app in Digital ocean (I > followed someoneâs steps a few years ago, and had a simple seaside app > running quite well) - so I was thinking of starting there. > > I know there is Svenâs P3 - but Iâm not sure Iâm ready to run and maintain > a SQL database for a simple application, but could be persuaded it its > simple to setup with little maintenance. Would mongo be a suggestion - is > that easy to setup and run? (And is that Voyage?). > > Possibly I could even use image persistence, and fuel out a Dictionary > from time to time - but I think that might be a little bit too belt and > braces for me. > > Is there something that gives a little table of tradeoffs with some simple > ways to get started? > > Tim

Oct. 6, 2020

Easiest light weight cloud/web persistence for Pharo?

by Tim Mackinnon

Hi everyone - Iâm wondering what is the recommended way to save some simple user data for a Pharo application I would like to run on the cloud (probably initially digital ocean, but could be AWS if it came to it). Initially I thought I might try and run my little app in Digital ocean (I followed someoneâs steps a few years ago, and had a simple seaside app running quite well) - so I was thinking of starting there. I know there is Svenâs P3 - but Iâm not sure Iâm ready to run and maintain a SQL database for a simple application, but could be persuaded it its simple to setup with little maintenance. Would mongo be a suggestion - is that easy to setup and run? (And is that Voyage?). Possibly I could even use image persistence, and fuel out a Dictionary from time to time - but I think that might be a little bit too belt and braces for me. Is there something that gives a little table of tradeoffs with some simple ways to get started? Tim

Oct. 5, 2020