WebGS

WebGS is a framework for building the back-end for modern web applications in GemStone/S 64 Bit Smalltalk. It provides a basic server and can respond to HTTP requests with Smalltalk-generated strings. While these strings can be HTML, in today's environment it is more common that they will be JSON.

Install

• Copy sample-setEnv.sh to setEnv.sh and edit to set GEMSTONE to a product tree.
• Copy sample-.topazini to .topazini and edit to properly describe a running GemStone/S system.
• Optional: Run setUnicodeMode.sh to use the modern character comparison mode (recommended if this is a new install).
• Run install.sh to install WebGS into your GemStone/S system.

Use

The typical use is to subclass WebApp and override appropriate methods. To see how this works, take a look at Sample.gs. You can run the application from a Topaz prompt (see runSyncSample.sh) or from an IDE (such as Jade) using Sample runHttp. If you have breakpoints or halts in your code, then the server will stop and you can debug the code (or just step through it to see how it works). To test the server, access it from a web browser (http://localhost:8888) or from a Linux or macOS shell:

curl http://localhost:8888/stone.gs
curl --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
   --request POST \
   --data '{"x":3,"y":5}' \
   http://localhost:8888/add.gs \
   && echo
curl http://localhost:8888/README.md

Of course, simple GET requests can be submitted from a browser and Postman is a great tool for working with web servers.

WebSockets

Sample.gs also has a demo of WebSockets. Please keep in mind that all your WebSocket connections on this host/port will be sharing the same gem and each connection will stay alive until it is dropped by the client. This may affect performance (depending on how much activity each connection requires) and it may affect behavior (think very carefully about changes to persistent objects and transactions!).

Tests

WebGS includes a set of tests written in Dart that can be run after you start a server. The tests also provides an example of how to interact with WebGS from a client application.

The speed test measures performance. On an Apple M4 the sync server answers about 1800 (trivial) AJAX requests per second and about 100 (small) file requests per second.