Seaside hosting redux

A while back I wrote about Seaside hosting options. It looks like things have changed some so I figured it was a good time to update my information.

There are still only 2 Seaside hosting sites on the internet.

There’s Seaside-Hosting, which is based in Switzerland. They offer free hosting for non-commercial applications. This service does not host databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL. You can however store data inside your Squeak image. You can also store external files on the server filesystem, using them as support for your site (like graphics images), though they don’t want you using it for hosting files for download. From what I’ve heard, the people who set up Seaside-Hosting will try to accomodate you for a fee if you have requirements that go beyond what they typically offer. There’s an e-mail address you can use to contact them for this purpose on their home page.

A new feature they’ve added since I last looked is you can now set up your own domain name (using a domain registration service) and use that instead of their seasidehosting.st domain.

There’s also Seaside Parasol, which is based in Canada, and offers commercial hosting for Seaside, as well as PHP and Perl. In terms of features not much has changed since the first time I reviewed it. There’s still no support for e-mail or database hosting, but the price has come down to about $23.55/mo. in U.S. Dollars. They’ve also added a Seaside demo potential customers can download and use to see what it’s like. And they’ve added useful information and links for getting Seaside up and running inside Squeak.

The price reduction is an improvement, however, unless they’re offering dedicated hosting it’s still not that competitive when compared with other web hosting platforms. ASP.Net shared hosting averages about $8-$10 (U.S.) per month. RoR and PHP hosting is $8 or less per month.

If you want the opportunity to get your site developed and set up with Seaside, a framework that is head and shoulders above many of the ones out there, Seaside Parasol and Seaside-Hosting are it.

Where can I get Seaside?

Seaside Parasol offers some instructions and links where you can get the Squeak VM and load Seaside into it. There are a couple Seaside developers who have created their own preconfigured Squeak images you can use:

• Ramon Leon
• Damien Cassou’s “Squeak web” image

If you go to Ramon’s page, you get the Squeak VM and his preconfigured image in one Zip file. Ramon’s image contains a bunch of extras. I know about them, because I’ve used his image for learning the Smalltalk language. In addition to Seaside it contains Monticello (a version control system for Squeak), Magritte (a meta language in Smalltalk for creating forms, reports, and graphs, and works with Seaside), Glorp (an object-relational framework for interfacing with an external database), SUnit (a unit testing framework), Albatross (a web app. testing framework, like Watir in Ruby), Mondrian (an app. that shows you graphically how classes are related, and their properties), Toothpick (a configurable logging library), SOAP-Client for interfacing with XML web services (including .Net), Scriptaculous (an AJAX framework for creating slick web UIs), VB-Regex (a regular expression pattern matching library), and some XML parsers/frameworks, among other things.

Damien Cassou’s image may contain the same stuff. I don’t know. One thing about Ramon’s image is it has a few customizations for running on Windows. I think it’ll run on other platforms okay, but expect to get some error messages when you first load it up.

Storing data in the image

Since neither hosting service offers database hosting, if you want to be able to store data, you should do it within the image. One possibility I’ve mentioned before is MinneStore, an object-oriented database written entirely in Smalltalk. I’m not sure how it works. It might just store data inside the image.

A simple way of storing read-only data is to create a class, and then create a class variable within it (equivalent to a static variable inside a class in languages like C++, C#, and Java). You can create your own data structure and put it in this variable using “class side” methods (again, equivalent to static methods in traditional languages). It will remain persistent. You do not need to instantiate an object to access it. It is globally available. If you want the data structure to be updateable and accessible from multiple Seaside sessions, then you’re going to have to use semaphores to make sure operations on the data structure are atomic. That’s when it can get hairy.

Edit 6/11/07: There are a couple of screencasts here and here by Lukas Renggli, on how to register and use the features of the Seaside-Hosting service.