Dynamic Web Development with Seaside

4.1Using the GLASS Virtual Appliance

The GLASS Virtual appliance is a pre-built, ready-to-run, 64-bit VMware virtual appliance configured to start GemStone, Seaside, Apache, and Firefox when it is booted. It is a complete Seaside development environment, including:

  • Seaside 2.8 running in a GemStone/S 2.2.5 64-bit multi-user Smalltalk virtual machine, application server and object database.
  • A Squeak 3.9 VM and Squeak image configured as a development environment for the GemStone/S server running on the appliance.
  • An Apache 2 web server configured to display Seaside applications running in GemStone/S.
  • A Firefox web browser set to display the GemStone/S system status on its home page (although you can reach that same page from any browser on your network.)
  • A toolbar menu to start, stop, or restart GLASS or Apache, start Squeak, and run GemStone/S backups.
  • A toolbar icon which starts a terminal session on the appliance.
  • The latest stable release of Xubuntu Linux — Version 7.10.

You start the GLASS Virtual Appliance from your VMware console, just as you would any other VMware virtual appliance. The first time it may take several minutes before the system is fully operational since it must boot Linux, start the GemStone/S server, three GemStone virtual machines, Apache, and Firefox. It’s ready once you see the status page shown in Figure 28.

GLASS Virtual Appliance status page

We recommend when you are ready to stop work, you suspend the appliance rather than shut it down. This will make the next startup much faster. You’ll be able to start up just where you left off.

The status of your GemStone/S system is refreshed every 10 seconds. All the GemStone processes listed in the right sidebar should have a green OK status as shown in Figure 29. If not, use the “GLASS Appliance” menu shown in Figure 30 to start, stop, or restart GLASS or its individual components.

GLASS Virtual Appliance status

You should now be able to explore the Seaside components installed in the GLASS Virtual appliance by clicking on the "GLASS: Seaside" bookmark you can see in Figure 31. You can also view that web page from another computer on your network by using the "eth0:" IP address listed under "Network Information".

GLASS Virtual Appliance Seaside page

Should you need to edit a file or perform other command line operations on the appliance, you can open a terminal session by clicking on the terminal icon in the toolbar. If you prefer, you can ssh to the appliance by using the IP address mentioned above and the username/password glass/glass. To copy files to/from the appliance use the scp command. Here’s an example of using scp to copy a seaside log file from the appliance to your current directory.

scp glass@192.168.77.128:/opt/gemstone/log/seaside.log .

GLASS Virtual Appliance menu

Copyright © 19 March 2024 Stéphane Ducasse, Lukas Renggli, C. David Shaffer, Rick Zaccone
This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

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