ok smalltalk, you want to do e commerce, but smalltalk stuck on 1 cpu, and you have 1000s customers???

[derr-fhurherr]

what now??

[r***@gemtalksystems.com]

Post by derr-fhurherr
what now??

GemStone/S is not stuck on one cpu. It has serious horizontal scalability.

[derr-fhurherr]

Post by r***@gemtalksystems.com

Post by derr-fhurherr
what now??

GemStone/S is not stuck on one cpu. It has serious horizontal scalability.

What is a big website running on gemstone?
What about magma?
or smalltalk prevayler like www.prevayler.org

[r***@gemtalksystems.com]

Post by derr-fhurherr

Post by r***@gemtalksystems.com
GemStone/S is not stuck on one cpu. It has serious horizontal scalability.

What is a big website running on gemstone?

I don't know about web sites specifically. I can tell you that between them, OOCL, NYK, and COSCO manage about 20% of the world's container shipping using GemStone. And there are a bunch of other notable/large companies running their businesses with GemStone (see http://gemtalksystems.com/index.php/about-us/customers-of-gemtalk-systems/).

With a web site, you can have any number of VMs processing the individual requests that come in, and you can use a load balancer if necessary to distribute the requests to multiple processors.

Post by derr-fhurherr
What about magma?
or smalltalk prevayler like www.prevayler.org

I can't speak to these as I don't know anything about them.

[troller]

do not feed the troll

Post by derr-fhurherr

Post by r***@gemtalksystems.com

Post by derr-fhurherr
what now??

GemStone/S is not stuck on one cpu. It has serious horizontal scalability.

What is a big website running on gemstone?
What about magma?
or smalltalk prevayler like www.prevayler.org

[derr-fhurherr]

also what about an appserver ?

cpu bound means you have to do nasty stuff liek use virtualization

which sucks

aolserver and ada aws etc can use 1 big big or 2 for redundancy etc.

[Oregonian Haruspex]

Post by derr-fhurherr
what now??

You take RoarVM and spend some money to improve it, and there you go.
Easy peasy.

[derr-fhurherr]

ok liek paul graham did with viaweb, can you fork a new smalltalk for each user? or is that hugely expnsive ram wise?? hmm

[k***@gmail.com]

Post by derr-fhurherr
what now??

simple, span multiple instances of your favorite smalltalk implementation and just build a small socket bridget that the instances will use to communicate with each other.

The OS assigns automatically each instance of an app on a different CPU to take better advantage of multiple cores.

[derr-fhurherr]

ok say 1 smalltak per cpu, or leave 1 cpu for os, then..... can the smalltalk images work together? asking each other for certain data? as one giant smart image?

[Richard Sargent]

Post by derr-fhurherr
ok say 1 smalltak per cpu, or leave 1 cpu for os, then..... can the smalltalk images work together? asking each other for certain data? as one giant smart image?

Yes, they can. As I have said before, look at GemStone/S and look at our customers.

[derr-fhurherr]

I mean free smalltalks.

[Richard Sargent]

Post by derr-fhurherr
I mean free smalltalks.

So did I. The GemStone/S Web Edition is free up to a certain limit. You will have no problem starting a business on it and growing it substantially before you need to pay anything.


The following information comes from http://seaside.gemtalksystems.com/docs/GLASS-Pricing-1201.htm:

Introducing a powerful new way to deploy desktop-like web applications – GLASS: GemStone, Linux, Apache, Seaside, Smalltalk.



You may already be familiar with the advantages Seaside has over other web development frameworks. But you may be concerned that Seaside lacks native persistence or won't scale.



By running your Seaside application in GemStone/S, you'll gain a Smalltalk based Application Server and OODB that:



• Provides fully transparent persistence that doesn't require Object-Relational Mapping

• Scales to over a hundred billion objects and thousands of simultaneous connections

• Supports fully ACID transactions to handle concurrency conflicts

• Handles up to thousands of HTTP requests per second

• Directly loads Monticello packages into a GemStone/S VM



GemStone/S is proven technology currently deployed in numerous global 500 companies in the financial, container shipping, manufacturing, and utilities sectors.

[derr-fhurherr]

so when you compare a smalltalk website to one done in say java or dotnet

are they easier to code?

are you able to debug performance problems?

Have you had a long installation say over 3 years and had any problem evolving the website and growing it to handle more users?

[Richard Sargent]

On Sunday, September 15, 2013 2:59:58 AM UTC-7, derr-fhurherr wrote:

I have to qualify my answer by noting that I have not personally built such a web site, but I have spoken with those who have (and continue to do).

Post by derr-fhurherr
so when you compare a smalltalk website to one done in say java or dotnet
are they easier to code?

I expect so. You stay within the Smalltalk paradigm, instead of the alphabet soup that seems to comprise other technologies.

Post by derr-fhurherr
are you able to debug performance problems?

Again, I expect so. You are always within the Smalltalk paradigm.

Post by derr-fhurherr
Have you had a long installation say over 3 years and had any problem
evolving the website and growing it to handle more users?

I haven't (see my disclaimer above), but our customers have some very large systems with very critical constraints, such as an electronic trading system in which 'more than 99% of all transactions completed in less than 20 milliseconds during peak trading periods' and has '40-75 million messages processed daily'.

I truly hope you can achieve such levels in your own business.

[derr-fhurherr]

Post by Richard Sargent
I truly hope you can achieve such levels in your own business.

I can only dream..

So smalltalk is well able to handle millions of customer sending tens of millions of messages without batting an eye.

wow

do you think magma or any free smalltalk database could keep up with the load?

or soemthing like smalltalk prevalence? like www.prevayler.org?

[Richard Sargent]

Post by derr-fhurherr
do you think magma or any free smalltalk database could keep up with the load?
or soemthing like smalltalk prevalence? like www.prevayler.org?

I cannot speak for other products. I can tell you GemStone/S has three decades of development behind it, to make it suitable and effective for our customers.

[derr-fhurherr]

Post by Richard Sargent

Post by derr-fhurherr
do you think magma or any free smalltalk database could keep up with the load?
or soemthing like smalltalk prevalence? like www.prevayler.org?

I cannot speak for other products. I can tell you GemStone/S has three decades of development behind it, to make it suitable and effective for our customers.

Thank you for your honest and helpful answers.

[nuffle]

Furher...


I do NOT think smalltalk will work for you. It is simply not designed to
handle the type of application you need. Most smalltalk dialects are
stuck in a single core. All threading is done within that one CPU. Most
smalltalks are proprietary. There are a handful of open source
smalltalk. But none of them are what you want either. Gemstone might
handle it, but it is proprietary and is a closed database environment.
(Glass is free, but not sure it be used for commercial, also limited
size database). Instead of all smalltalkers pulling together to build
one great system, they are off in their own little corner building their
own separate dialects of smalltalk. That is why the language is dead.

Meanwhile, you are wasting time in the smalltalk world. It is not what
you want. You need something that is industrial strength out of the
box. If you are planning for 1000's of simultaneous connections, you
want to go with powerful, dynamic, internet language like PHP.

- PHP runs on Linux
- PHP support 1000's of internet transactions.
- PHP is a dynamic language, like smalltalk,
- PHP is very powerful.
- PHP is free/open source
- PHP is available on most web hosting services
- PHP works with Apache
- PHP works with MySQL
- PHP has a huge user community with most answers on Stackoverflow.com
- PHP has hundreds of IDEs for it
- PHP has tons of libraries
- PHP works directly with HTML, it is the best way to build a website

For what you need, PHP cannot be beat. Go use it.

Smalltalk is a dead language. Don't invest any time/money in it. You
also cannot find any programmers to help you on your project.

Go use PHP !!

You will love PHP...

Go get PHP !!!!

Go Here: http://www.php.net/

There is tons of money to be made out there with PHP !
Go make your money with PHP !

Good luck !!!

Post by derr-fhurherr

Post by Richard Sargent
I truly hope you can achieve such levels in your own business.

I can only dream..
So smalltalk is well able to handle millions of customer sending tens of millions of messages without batting an eye.
wow
do you think magma or any free smalltalk database could keep up with the load?
or soemthing like smalltalk prevalence? like www.prevayler.org?

[Richard Sargent]

On Thursday, September 19, 2013 10:51:43 AM UTC-7, nuffle wrote:
A lot of stuff, some of which is valid and reasonable, some of which is rubbish, and some of which is just plain uninformed and erroneous.

1) The language and an implementation are separate. The language is entirely suitable for building his application. Many implementations, as you point out, are designed for a single user on a single machine, although can run on a server and connect to a relational database with any number of instances running to provide the necessary concurrency.

2) You suggest a proprietary implementation is some kind of evil. But virtually every Smalltalk comes with complete source code (at least for the Smalltalk image, and some include the VM source, too).

3) GLASS is free, may be used for commercial purposes, and does not limit the database size at all. The shared page cache is limited to 2 GB, which is plenty for many commercial applications. It can become a performance issue as your business volume grows, but not likely before your business is at the "wildly successful" stage and at which paying for a professional system and support can be justified. By the time you are dealing with millions of transactions, you have almost certainly outgrown MySQL and other free databases. (Not to dis them, but many of them have limitations.)

4) "That is why the language is dead" is pretty simplistic. While it is part of the story, it is far from the whole story, and far from being true.

5) "You need something that is industrial strength out of the box." True. Just ask Texas Instruments, Florida Power & Light, JP Morgan, ICE, NYK, COSCO, and many others. They all use GemStone/S. They might know a bit more about the suitability of Smalltalk to business than you.

6) "works with MySQL" may not be the best claim, as there are many people who claim things like "Mysql is not safe to run in transactional mode and store mission critical data such as financial transactions."

7) There are lots of Smalltalkers available. Not as many as Java or other languages, of course. It's not like we all just rolled over and died when pundits declared our favourite language to be "dead".

And it's not hard to train up your own staff. Smalltalk is one of the few languages that was designed for children to learn and use. That is the reason for its low error rate and high function point and productivity ratios.

There is a feedback effect at work. Higher productivity means smaller teams, less overhead, better communication, and lower costs (even though a Smalltalk developer may cost more than a Java programmer).


=============


All that being said, I do NOT tell you to exclude PHP or any other language from your consideration. You need to determine what language, development library, tool sets, database, etc. will best suit your needs.

I am telling you that Smalltalk, specifically GemStone/S, will suit your needs. It will have fewer disparate parts than other choices. If you want to have to master many different technologies at the same time in order to deliver a product to market, you may want to go with something other than Smalltalk. If you want to get the job done easily and well, check it out.

[nuffle]

Richard,

Didn't mean to ruffle any feathers over at Gemtalk. Yes, Gemstone
probably can handle the problem. But it is about the only
IMPLEMENTATION that can! Yes, Gemstone/S is Industrial strength. But
Texas Instruments, Florida Power& Light, JP Morgan, ICE, NYK, COSCO,
are the ones that can afford to pay either $7000/core or $15000/core per
machine. (source: http://www.slideshare.net/esug/gemtalk ). (More than
I made last 3 years doing smalltalk !)

But GLASS is like your first FREE taste of crack. Once you get hooked
on it, you will have to rob little old ladies to afford the license fees
(or be a fortune 500 company). Looking at it this way, I would not do
my next startup on GLASS.

BTW, my opinions are based on 20 years of smalltalking. And BTW,
it is also my OPINION that Windows is not a suitable server platform.
Therefore, if it does not run on Linux, does not run near machine code
speeds and does not support multi-core out of the box, then I would not
choose it for a startup's web application development. There are so
many other good choices out there

For more about how I formed my OPINION on windows look here:
http://redmondmag.com/articles/2013/08/22/windows-8-security-issues.aspx

Post by Richard Sargent
You suggest a proprietary implementation is some kind of evil.

Yes, I have had a lawsuit threatened by Getty Images for a tiny image
that was on a website that I bought from a guy, that was developed in
eastern europe. Copyright laws can kill you. Why take the chance that
some software vendor is going to come in and shut you down? Did you
know that by US copyright law, the plaintiff is allowed to recover
attorneys fees from the defendant? A proprietary software company can
shut you down just for the fun of it by burying you in legal fees! My
OPINION: Start your company right, avoid proprietary software platforms
at all costs. Again, just an opinion based on experience (and $1000
license fee for a tiny website image).

Post by Richard Sargent
"That is why the language is dead" is pretty simplistic."

Yes, and I stand by that overly simplistic statement. Think about it.
Look around at all the smalltalk implementations and tell me why I
cannot run multiple cores at machine code speeds? There is one guy on
Pharo who is trying, but one guy cannot fix a dying industry.

But, every time you turn around somebody is building a NEW smalltalk
dialect. Whoop-Dee-Do! Every smalltalker wants to play in their own
little sandbox and every company wants to charge an arm and leg for
their 30 year old implementation. The excuse is always the same: we
need to feed our hungry, hungry programmers and just think of all the
support you get! Net result, everybody is pulling in different
directions and smalltalk keeps dying.

Also, every few months another debate breaks out in this newsgroup about
why smalltalk is dying and nobody can agree on anything. Everybody
keeps arguing about it and everybody digs in their heels.
I stand by my OPINION that too many proprietary dialects caused the
downfall of smalltalk.

Post by Richard Sargent
some of which is rubbish, and some of which is just plain uninformed
and erroneous

No, It may be a lot of opinions and it may have made you angry, but that
is not the same as erroneous rubbish. My opinions are based on personal
experiences and conclusions drawn against the facts. They are based on
30 years of programming experience and 20 years with smalltalk.
(oh, and did I mention 15 years of debugging windows viruses for
everyone in my extended family). But show me some new facts and I might
change my conclusions.


No hard feelings though, if I ever get up to Beaverton, I'll buy you a
beer.

Meanwhile, as for the Führer, he is not really looking for a solution
anyway. So don't sweat it.

[derr-fhurherr]

Post by nuffle
Furher...
I do NOT think smalltalk will work for you. It is simply not designed to
handle the type of application you need. Most smalltalk dialects are
stuck in a single core. All threading is done within that one CPU. Most
smalltalks are proprietary. There are a handful of open source
smalltalk. But none of them are what you want either. Gemstone might
handle it, but it is proprietary and is a closed database environment.
(Glass is free, but not sure it be used for commercial, also limited
size database). Instead of all smalltalkers pulling together to build
one great system, they are off in their own little corner building their
own separate dialects of smalltalk. That is why the language is dead.
Meanwhile, you are wasting time in the smalltalk world. It is not what
you want. You need something that is industrial strength out of the
box. If you are planning for 1000's of simultaneous connections, you
want to go with powerful, dynamic, internet language like PHP.
- PHP runs on Linux
- PHP support 1000's of internet transactions.
- PHP is a dynamic language, like smalltalk,
- PHP is very powerful.
- PHP is free/open source
- PHP is available on most web hosting services
- PHP works with Apache
- PHP works with MySQL
- PHP has a huge user community with most answers on Stackoverflow.com
- PHP has hundreds of IDEs for it
- PHP has tons of libraries
- PHP works directly with HTML, it is the best way to build a website
For what you need, PHP cannot be beat. Go use it.
Smalltalk is a dead language. Don't invest any time/money in it. You
also cannot find any programmers to help you on your project.
Go use PHP !!
You will love PHP...
Go get PHP !!!!
Go Here: http://www.php.net/
There is tons of money to be made out there with PHP !
Go make your money with PHP !
Good luck !!!

Post by derr-fhurherr

Post by Richard Sargent
I truly hope you can achieve such levels in your own business.

I can only dream..
So smalltalk is well able to handle millions of customer sending tens of millions of messages without batting an eye.
wow
do you think magma or any free smalltalk database could keep up with the load?
or soemthing like smalltalk prevalence? like www.prevayler.org?

php is for dorks

[derr-fhurherr]

Post by k***@gmail.com

Post by derr-fhurherr
what now??

simple, span multiple instances of your favorite smalltalk implementation and just build a small socket bridget that the instances will use to communicate with each other.
The OS assigns automatically each instance of an app on a different CPU to take better advantage of multiple cores.

Are you doing this?
I am not yet a good programmer so I would not know how....