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

by Sven Van Caekenberghe

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

Jan. 28, 2013

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

by Sven Van Caekenberghe

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

Jan. 28, 2013

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

by Francois Stephany

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

Jan. 28, 2013

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

by Nick Smith

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

Jan. 28, 2013

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

by Nick Smith

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

Jan. 28, 2013

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

by Geert Claes

While it is great that one can actually use Smalltalk in Cloud Foundry ... it does require a lot of steps to get it going. Having said that reckon it would be interresting to have an easy to use Pharo-as-a-Service. For persistence maybe rely on things like MongoLab or MongoHQ so you don't have to worry about that? fstephany wrote > http://programminggems.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/adding-smalltalk-to-cloud-f… > > http://programminggems.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/using-mysql-in-aida-on-phar… > > https://programminggems.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/using-mysql-from-smalltalk… > > Are the three articles describing it :) -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Phaas-anyone-interested-in-setting-up-Pharo-as-a-Serv… Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Jan. 28, 2013

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

by Geert Claes

Those providers are listed on the .org site at: http://core.cloudfoundry.org/listings Janko MivÅ¡ek wrote > Just a side-note: according to Wikipedia article [1] there are already > some commercial PaaS providers based on CloudFork: > - Uhuru Software, Inc. is one company that has created a AppCloud > using Cloud Foundry. Uhuru's PaaS provides support for multiple > frameworks (.NET, Rails, and Spring) and languages (Java, Ruby, PHP, > and C#). > - AppFog hosts their PaaS on Amazon Web Services, OpenStack and Windows > Azure.[1] [2] > - ActiveState is a company that has created a commercial distribution > of the Cloud Foundry software for enterprises to host their own > private PaaS. Their product has support for additional languages and > frameworks, an adds a dashboard and security protocols.[3] > - Tier 3 is a company that has created an Enterprise-oriented PaaS > combining Cloud Foundry with their Iron Foundry OSS Project that > provides .NET and SQL Server Support. -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Re-Phaas-anyone-interested-in-setting-up-Pharo-as-a-S… Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Jan. 28, 2013

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

by James Foster

On Jan 27, 2013, at 3:51 AM, Andy Burnett <andy.burnett(a)knowinnovation.com> wrote: >> I built CloudFoundry so that you uploaded a .st file (in my ESUG example it was 'aida.st') that was used to build the image. The server executed the .st file and saved the resulting image (it could load .mcz files directly or execute a Metacello script). Whenever your application was needed, a copy of the saved image was used. >> >> James Foster > > James, can I check a few assumptions - I want to make sure I am not > putting words in VMWare's mouth, or missing an opportunity. Janko has done a good job of summarizing the current situation. > 1. Is it the case that CloudFoundry.com has no current plans to offer > gemstone as a hosted option? I am not aware of any such plans, and at the present time I think it would be unlikely. (Note that we are completely different teams in different locations in different parts of a large organization. My knowledge of and interaction with the Cloud Foundry team is essentially the same as that of anyone else who forked their code on GitHub.) As Janko noted, cloudfoundry.com is still in beta and the commercial arrangements are not yet formalized. I believe that Cloud Foundry will be part of the VMware/EMC spin-off (as will GemStone), so there is a bit more uncertainty than usual. > 2. Your work on getting Aida to run was targeted at the > cloudfoundry.org, And therefore it would require someone to set up a > separate hosting operation - using the cloudfoundry code - in order > for us to use your work? Yes. As Janko noted there are others doing the same thing. > If 1 and 2 are true, is there anyway that we can use the .com side in > pursuit of this PhaaS objective? I assume not, but I would hate to > miss the simple fix :-) Speaking as an observer of business operations (not as a VMware employee), I suspect that the best way would be to demonstrate commercial feasibility. James Foster > Cheers > Andy

Jan. 27, 2013

MenuMorph - dual column?

by Ben Coman

I have a MenuMorph with too many items, such that it fills the screen top to bottom and there are still some not shown. Is there some inbuilt way to have the menu come up in two columns? I could otherwise work at manually segregating menuitems into submenus, but the menus are dynamically generated and I'd prefer multiple columns. cheers -ben

Jan. 27, 2013

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

by Francois Stephany

On 27/01/13 07:04, James Foster wrote: > On Jan 26, 2013, at 7:30 AM, Francois Stephany <tulipe.moutarde(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> On 26/01/13 02:02, Andy Burnett wrote: >>> Our requirements are pretty simple. We need a way of uploading an image, >>> and some standard for of persistence. At this point, we would be >>> perfectly happy to make compromises by agreeing that it had to be e.g. >>> Mongo or whatever (although ideally it would be gemstone). We just want >>> to make some progress on this. >> >> I would prefer to upload a MetacelloConfiguration (or something similar) instead of an image. > > I built CloudFoundry so that you uploaded a .st file (in my ESUG example it was 'aida.st') that was used to build the image. The server executed the .st file and saved the resulting image (it could load .mcz files directly or execute a Metacello script). Whenever your application was needed, a copy of the saved image was used. That sounds great. http://programminggems.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/adding-smalltalk-to-cloud-f… http://programminggems.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/using-mysql-in-aida-on-phar… https://programminggems.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/using-mysql-from-smalltalk… Are the three articles describing it :) Thanks James

Jan. 27, 2013