Great, impressive work, Esteban, thanks for sharing. I wish you luck in completing your pilot. Let us known if you need help in critical areas. Sven On 04 Jan 2014, at 20:16, Esteban A. Maringolo <emaringolo@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
After one year of negotiations (demos, quotes, etc.) and a couple of months of development, by the end of December we released a pilot version of our pharo based solution. The solution consists of a native mobile app (Android), with Pharo 2.0 servers, using Seaside for the web UI, Seaside-REST for the mobile app API and Zinc Websockets to certain "live" features of the web. The persistence is GLORP using the native PostgreSQL driver.
I can't disclose much more about the customer or the solution yet, it is a private solution for a multinational consumer goods company operating in Argentina.
But I can comment on the numbers: * The pilot will end in ~40 days * It involves 50 mobile users of the Android app using it daily. * An nginx frontend for static files and http proxying to the pharo app servers * Two pharo images as servers, one for the web interface, and one for the REST API. The image is the same, they work as two separate app servers to make use of each server and for improved reliability (I don't want the seaside failures, which has been none yet, to affect the REST API). * Everything running in DigitalOcean droplets based in NYC (they add ~180ms of latency from here but their price/value equations is unmatched).
Some performance numbers: * The Pharo server uptime has been no less than perfect, the first 10 days with uninterrupted uptime. Only shutdown to upgrade the image (yesterday night). * The load is minor, with peaks of ~30 concurrent mobile users during a few "business" moments of the day, the server never passed 15% of CPU use. The disk I/O is also small, but the database is small too (growing daily).
If the pilot succeeds the plan is to extend the user base to ~1000 mobile users. But some water must pass under the bridge before thinking of that. And if it ever happens, it is going to be gradual.
Some anecdotal info I quit my Smalltalk full time job at InfOil (after 9 years of employment) to dedicate 100% to my new company. So I'm betting big on this. By now I'm the sole Smalltalk developer (devops?) of the company. Time has never been more scarce than nowadays.
Why Pharo? * Because it is the best open source Smalltalk ("inspired") out there. * Because I have 10+ years of experience with Smalltalk I can't throw away in the context of rapid prototyping and business domain modelling (emphasis on this). * It was a key advantage during the negotiations, we could show a wireframed live app even before our competition prepared a PowerPoint presentation.
The development process with Pharo has been rudimentary, only Monticello packages and a couple of workspace scripts to provision new images. I still can't get my head around Metacello. But honestly I haven't dedicated as much time as it needs to be learnt. Having used VAST ENVY's ConfigurationMaps successfully in the past is a proof I can learn Metacello.
During the last years at InfOil we were using git with Dolphin Smalltalk, with CI after every git push to the main repo. This was also linked with our issue tracking system, in order to know in which build a certain issue was fixed. We used Dolphin's PAX's files (CVS friendly), Gitlab, JetBrain's TeamCity and YouTrack I'd like to do the same using Monticello's FileTree, BitBucket and JIRA (CI server to be defined).
Hopefully with some time, I'll be able to dive deeper into this. My learning of Pharo tooling hasn't been straightforward, but maybe because I'm old and spoiled with other Smalltalk dialects (VSE, VAST, Dolphin). I was managing the Android code (java) with git branching and merging way before I learnt how to use Monticello. Managing the code (files) was the only advantage of working with Eclipse/Java. Everything else was a burden compared with Pharo.
I wanted to share my experiences through a blog, but haven't had time to set it up as I'd like, and by now this email is going to be all I can share. After the pilot, we can talk about reporting a success story for Pharo. I felt like this during the last week: http://devopsreactions.tumblr.com/post/68251866244/successful-deployment-at-...
Best regards,
Esteban A. Maringolo CTO (aka DevOps), http://trentosur.com