RESTful GemStone with multiple sessions

The project I'm working on is moving to a full web deployment from a classic VW fat client + GS. Our layers are now Seaside on VW and GemStone. To allow for this migration, we've done interesting work with VW window specs and domain meta data, which I'll comment on in future posts. Here I'll go over how we are interfacing to GemStone from our Seaside server.

Our goal is to have a snappy application, so we view Seaside as a simple presentation layer. It contains no domain classes, only view components with widgets that are coded to know which attribute they display. Getting data from GS is done by packaging the list of displayed attributes, along with the oop of the displayed object, and sending it to GS. GS answers an XML string, which is parsed into 'domain node' objects (generic data holders) and then used by the display.

xmlDomainNodeOop:attributes:collectionOop: #(6944141057 #('comment') 656304641)


<domain>
<oop>6944141057</oop>
<objectClassName>BIDcustomer</objectClassName>
...
<domain>
<objectClassName>ByteString</objectClassName>
<text>comment</text>
... <value>a comment string</value>
</domain>

We develop in a full VW client, so debugging is done by sending the #xmlDomainNodeOop:attributes:collectionOop:  method in a workspace. Very handy when trying to recreate a user problem.

If you've ever worked with GemStone (and, if you're programming in Smalltalk, my sympathies if you have not), you would be familiar with the GBS interface, the magical code which keeps objects in sync between the client and the server. You can choose to have methods execute where they make most sense (like UI heavy methods on the client and big data footprint methods on the sever) and know that your objects are in the correct state in both environments. Very cool.

With our oop + attributes question and XML answer, we don't make use of that GBS feature. In fact, we'd prefer a way to turn it off. Since each request and answer pair is independent, there is no need for session state and we can run each Seaside server with multiple sessions, using round robin dispatching.

Doing that introduces a few technical curiosities (and a huge thanks to Martin McClure for his help in fixing them). First, you can't share a class connector between GS sessions. In the single session model, I had a thin 'client dispatcher' class that forwarded class messages to server class that interfaced with the domain model and provided tools for building the XML answer. For multiple sessions, I had to link to an instance, so both class became singletons and each session defined its own connector.

Next, we tripped over the fact that you can't share objects between sessions. That makes sense in a GBS model, since syncing the objects is a session responsibly. But we were not passing domain objects and each request and answer were done with new Array and String instances. Turns out the problem was a method with an attribute parameter coded as #( ('value') ). Our parameter copy was not deep enough, so each tried to connect the nested array and we ended up with the error...

Attempt to associate a Array with more than one GemStone session

Replacing the parameter with 'Array with: (Array with: 'value')) fixed the problem. We've since added our own deepCopy extensions to prevent these types of problems in the future.

The session round robin mechanism is done with our on GS session wrapper. A class collection of session instances is rotated through, with the 'next session' pointer incremented after each use. If a session semaphore is busy, we skip to the next one. If they're all busy, we wait on the one we started with. We've been testing with three sessions, and since most of our GS session access takes less than 50ms, it's very rare that we a delay due to a busy session. We still have the occasional outlier (like the five seconds in this sample), but most of those are due to GS faulting pages in our test environment. We expect our production server to have everything cached.

It will be interesting to see how well we scale. Our system uses a dispatcher image to direct Seaside sessions to GS images, so we can adjust to load by increasing the number of Seaside images, and the number of GS sessions each image can support.

So far this technology mix is working well for us, and we're getting very positive feedback from our users.


Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible.