Hi all, >From Torsten, I've received a request to post about some technical details of ALLSTOCKER (http://pharo.org/success/AllStocker) . I hope these notes will be interesting to Pharo web developers.
- Seaside / Teapot We are using Seaside as a main framework for ALLSTOCKER marketplace. Seaside's component architecture is great for extending application in an organized way. ALLSTOCKER prototype was originally composed of only 3 class categories. Now these were gradually grown to 70 categories. But we still feel that they are manageable. We also use Teapot for building Web-based API in a quick way. Recently we've built webhook handlers for integration with other services. - Templating with Mustaside We need a lot of responsive-design web pages for supporting various mobile devices. (It is important especially for Southeast Asian countries, where tablets are popular than PCs). We would like to adopt existing Twitter Bootstrap templates for saving time. So, Mustaside was our choice. http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~MasashiUmezawa/Mustaside Before Mustaside, there were a lot of noisy #div: sends in our code. Now they are gone. - Localization Our business target is world-wide. So localization is very important topic. Currently ALLSTOCKER supports 4 languages and we will add Chinese languages soon. Translation strings are not only in Smalltalk code, but also in Mustache templates. So we selected Soup for extracting translatable strings in those templates. http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~PharoExtras/Soup For managing translations, we use Gettext package. http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~PharoExtras/Gettext - Databases For transactional data, we chose Glorp. Although there are mapping costs, we prefer RDB (Postgres). It is reliable for handling precious order-related data. However, for supporting complex search of machines, we use Neo4j - a graph database. It supports very powerful query language called Cypher. We can avoid complex table joins and get aggregated results faster. http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~MasashiUmezawa/Neo4reSt - Keyword search ALLSTOCKER supports free keyword search. We selected Elasticsearch for search-engine. Elasticsearch has elaborated searching facilities and those are easily accessible via REST API. We have extended the existing Elasticsearch client for Pharo 5. https://github.com/newapplesho/elasticsearch-smalltalk - Deployment We are using AWS Elastic Load Balancer and running Nginx as a front-end web server. Two back-end Pharo images are running and load-balanced with sticky sessions. It was sort of difficult to find the appropriate simultaneous number of database connections and Pharo processes. We feel ALLSTOCKER is pretty stable for now, but we need to adjust more for expanding our services. Best regards, -- [:masashi | ^umezawa]
