thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. In the course of reading your mail I thought: "It seems what we really need is a place for lots of tutorials, cookbooks and best practices, not so much a platform". The fact that there is such a hetergeneous environment out there, and the fact that there are differences between Smalltalk platforms (and even within them: several available HTTP servers/adaptors) it seems we should not so much concentrate on a single platform. Such a platform could easily be dismissed by many people for one of the reasons you mentioned.

I think a collection of cookbooks would. Maybe defining layers of a web app, starting from the Browser through all layers of functionality to the data backend, and collecting material for each of them would be much better. If I'm interested in a load-balanced, https-aware installation of a Squeak Image that persists data in Magma, I can choose appropriate documentation for each layer. Some layers may not be deeply related to Smalltalk at all, then we could add links to relevant information (like how do I configure Apache as a load balancer with Sticky sessions?), while others might be deeply related to Smalltalk.

Hi Romain, Laurent,

Having Amazon ec2 image is also a very good idea, and some
Smalltalkers have already made first important steps like:

http://www.nickager.com/blog/Create-a-free-Gemstone-server-in-the-cloud-in-10-minutes/

After having shared the above Amazon AMI (Amazon machine image), and experimented with EC2 hosting, I realised there are some undesirable properties of AMIs:

1) It's an image; with all the benefits and problems that entails; namely either you like the whole thing or not. It's not composable; it's difficult to know precisely what has been configured and how, and difficult to choose the bits you like and replace the bits you don't like.

2) You can't (currently for Linux), create an AMI locally and upload it, meaning everything has to be performed remotely and operating remotely in the IDE over X11 forwarding can be slow.

3) It's difficult to share across regions. Amazon's data centres operate autonomously. I created the image in EU-WEST and copying it to US-WEST or US-EAST is non-trivial.

4) It's another configuration that I need to keep up to date and I don't.

5) Not everyone wants to use EC2; other cloud services are available eg slicehost, linode, cloud-foudry etc

6) I configured the AMI using Amazon Linux, people might prefer Ubuntu, RHEL, Suse, Windows!#*? etc

7) I configured the AMI using Nginx as a front-end server with added modules (http://nickager.com/blog/compiling-nginx-to-add-extra-modules/), others might require other modules or other different server eg Apache, Cherokee etc. Even with the same server the configuration required can vary (url redirection, static file serving etc).

8) Everyone has a different way of performing backups, monitoring the health of the server.

9) I configured the AMI using Gemstone, others might prefer image based persistence or MySQL, Postgres etc.

10) Ideally the configuration would allow you to specify the number of images (or Gems for Gemstone) you'd like to respond to request, behind a load balancer.

11) We currently require infrastructure support for https eg stunnel or reverse proxy through a webserver eg http://www.monkeysnatchbanana.com/posts/2010/06/23/reverse-proxying-to-seaside-with-nginx.html

Quite a list... The main issue is that I'd like to be able to build server infrastructure from composable pieces and share configuration knowledge with others. This led me to Chef (http://opscode.com/chef/) where people create configuration "recipes" and a specific configuration is composed from these recipes. The benefit of using something like Chef is that there are already recipes for the standard parts of the server configuration eg installing and configuring Apache, Nginx, MySql, Postgres etc have already been taken care of. Chef abstracts the OS, and the cloud (eg EC2, slicehost etc).

The task is then to create recipes for Seaside specific parts. There are a couple of Gemstone recipes already (https://github.com/timfel/gemstone-cookbooks, https://github.com/johnnyt/gemstone-cookbooks). A few of us (myself Norbert Hartl, Stephen Eggermont) plan to investigate coding our configurations is Chef - though it's still early days and it may prove that it's more complex than we need.

Our basic requirements are to be able to rapidly deploy production, staging, backup, Jenkins continuous integration and development VMs.

Do others have experience with Chef or something similar?

Ideally ESUG or someone else would provide http://www.heroku.com/ for Seaside - but it would require formalising more of our stack and providing a flexible solution to https.

Hope this helps,

Nick