Comments on: Seaside, ODBC, and Sql Server for the .Net Developer

By: Ramon Leon

Ramon Leon — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 22:10:22 +0000

As I said in the article, “for a .Net programmer”. If you expect to do business in the corporate world, you have to deal with Oracle and SqlServer, period. That doesn’t mean I prefer them or like them, I actually prefer Postgres myself for a relational database, mysql sucks. By the way, if you didn’t notice, I’m not telling anyone to jump on the Microsoft bandwagon, rather the opposite… I’m giving those on the bandwagon a path out by showing them how to step off it one foot at a time, or did you not notice that this is a Smalltalk blog?

By: Claudio Schneider

Claudio Schneider — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:14:02 +0000

Why should anyone support “sql server” only because it is mainstream?

I am against sql server because it does not fit my view of how software should be, but seaside, squeak does. It is a completely different world.

So in the end the whole seaside should be adapeted to all the microsoft way of thinking?

I prefer support for some nice cool databases, let it be via odbc or natively, say mysql, postgres, oracle, firebird.

And of course the oo solutions.

Don’T jump on a microsoft train only because of it’s power on the market.

Sorry for my bad english, hopefully someone understands the point

Claudio

By: Ramon Leon

Ramon Leon — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:31:21 +0000

Yup, sounds like pretty much what I think as well, I’m just waiting patiently for Gemstone to release and give me an out.

By: Joe

Joe — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 18:39:25 +0000

Thanks Ramon. I think our view on persistence is more or less the same. I have been toying with GLORP and Postgres and while it’s ok, I had hoped to get out of that RDMS box with Smalltalk. I’ve spent years learning how to tweak the heck out of SQL Server, Oracle, etc. I’m perfectly comfortable writing complex SQL, spending time in query optimizers, doing partitioning, tablespaces, etc., but I feel like it takes up way too much time. I’ve worked with Python, Ruby, etc. and found most of the frameworks available do nothing for me.

As I am sure you know, everyone wants their software “yesterday.” My aim bringing Smalltalk into my work place which is about 90% MS right now (Gold Partner no less) is to save myself as much time as possible while making it interesting to write code again. Frankly I am tired of the select ORM or write stored procedures, then build MVC/MVP framework on top of .NET, then add a million layers of patterns, IOC, etc. It all seems so taped together at this point and it gets to the point where sometimes the code complexity of apps that do essentially nothing astounds me.

Other web frameworks such as Rails seem more of the same to me, especially since they often treat data like a second class citizen (Rails) which is just wrong (data ALWAYS outlives apps, evidence DBs I’m still interfacing with from 20 years ago). Smalltalk with Seaside on the other hand feels so much more interesting to me, but it just seems to need a good kick in the web world as far as widely available and affordable persistence mechanisms that have support behind them. My customers aren’t going to start using a persistence engine written by “some guy” no matter how good it is. Furthermore, they need something they can understand. I think the ability to truly save object state with transactions and query for data effectively under heavy loads is going to be awesome.

By: Ramon Leon

Ramon Leon — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 22:50:12 +0000

Gemstone isn’t currently publicly available, but it’s so very very close, they’re just finalizing some issues with the Squeak tools and they have a few beta testers banging on it, all seems to be going really well. The coolest part is that you’ll basically hook up to the gemstone service with your normal Squeak tools. I think Gemstone will ultimately be the best route, if you can start fresh. Until then, my preferred solution is Glorp and Postgres, which work really well for me so far.

If you really needed to, it wouldn’t be too much trouble writing a Glorp driver for the ODBC adapter and connecting to Glorp to Sql Server for legacy stuff. I didn’t used to think using ODBC was OK, because if it being single threaded, but this doesn’t really matter when you roll out 20 images in a 2 server farm, it’d probably scale OK. Currently I just connect to .Net via web services and that’s worked fine for me.

If I had to use relational for legacy Sql Server stuff, if possible, I’d use Glorp and Postgres and just replicated the necessary data between Sql and Postgres, using ODBC against Sql would be the final option.

Gemstone of course is the best solution, nothing can top an ACID compliant Smalltalk image that can scale to thousands of servers without requiring manual partitioning like a Sql cluster would.

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 20:59:18 +0000

Great blog Ramon, as a .NET/C coder at work and a Smalltalk coder at home, I can definitely relate to your perspective.

I too have been very curious about working with databases in seaside. It seems to me for something SQL Server aka Enterprise Level to the .NET developer, Gemstone is the way to go in the Smalltalk world to keep things nice and object oriented. My problem is it seems to be impossible to get good info about Gemstone. On the one hand there is all this info about working with Gemstone and Smalltalk, but then I don’t see much to download/actually work with it. I know there’s all that GLASS stuff supposed to be released, but is it actually available for setup? You mentioned wanting to try it, any luck yet? I looked at MAGMA and others, but I’m not really satisfied.

I guess my hesitation with bringing Smalltalk into my work more is I would hate to consume web services like this (sometimes not possible with my clients and security policies). I know inevitably I’ll hit some annoying problems (bad enough with .NET and COM already) like the .NET document encoded web service. What do I need to download/setup to get going with what is available for Gemstone so far? Maybe this is a better question for the gemstone guys, but no help on that front so far. I saw your GLORP implementation and considered it with Postgres, but I’d like to move away from the relational model if I’m going Smalltalk. Any more thoughts? Thanks.

By: Ramon Leon

Ramon Leon — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:12:10 +0000

Unfortunately, no, as far as I know there is no way to access a .Net document encoded web service in Squeak.

By: ip

ip — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 08:41:25 +0000

thanks for ur quick reply, you said in your post “SoapClient has recently been made compatible with .Net after I did a little begging and pleading with the author, Masashi Umezawa, to make a few changes to accommodate .Net’s quirks” i thought this would allow squeak client to support document encoding. the service i’m calling is a 3rd party service which i have no control over, any ideas on how i can make Squeak Soap client to talk to it

By: Ramon Leon

Ramon Leon — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 17:27:42 +0000

You need to make sure the services are marked with the either the SoapRpcService or SoapRpcMethod attributes, the Squeak Soap client does not support document encoding, the .Net default.

By: ip

ip — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:40:05 +0000

Hey Ramon I’m trying to call a .NET web service

|call |

call := (SoapCallEntry tcpHost: ‘ws.textanywhere.net’ port: 80) newCall.
call targetObjectURI: ‘http://ws.textanywhere.net/ta_sms.asmx’.
call methodName: ‘CheckNumber’.
call addParameters: {
{#Number. ‘07908856934′, ‘xsd:string’}.

call invokeAndReturn.

It doesn’t seem to work could help us out when u got time?

By: Tech Blog Carnival #6! // Swiecki’s Blog

Tech Blog Carnival #6! // Swiecki’s Blog — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 23:47:42 +0000

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