David Buck <dav### [at] simberoncom> wrote:

First off, thank-you for the effort you put in - you recreated the site when
there was nothing, and it sparked a new round of artwork from the community.

> I volunteered my time for a period of about a year to re-develop the
> IRTC site since nobody else was stepping up to the plate.  If I was
> going to rewrite the site software, it would at least be in a language
> which I like and understand well.  That's why I chose Smalltalk.  If
> anyone else volunteers to take over the project and rewrite the code,
> you can use any language you wish.
>
> The project became more complicated when Chris Cason expressed the
> desire to make the pages bookmarkable and google-indexable. The site was
> developed in Seaside which normally puts session keys into the URLS.
> Making the pages bookmarkable changed this policy and made the coding
> harder.  It also meant that users browsing the site without logging in
> used a new session for every page hit.

Seaside code is a thing of beauty, but, honestly, I've never bought into the URL
scheme (or the "breaks the back button" justification). I was looking at
AIDA/Web recently, and I like it's model and URL scheme much better, but you
lose the html abstraction and mature jquery etc libraries that Seaside
provides...

> After finally making the site live and struggling to correct problems
> amidst much complaining from the community, we got the software stable
> except for one nagging problem. The web sessions are always set to
> time-out.  In order to give people enough time to submit images without
> timing out, we had to increase the timeout to 30 minutes.  But, to allow
> the site to be navigable without logging in and to be bookmarkable,
> every page view created a new session.  The combination of these two
> factors meant that lots of hits by users who weren't logged in would
> create lots of sessions and eat up lots of memory.  The application was
> chewing up too much memory and was causing problems with the server.

So that's the place to concentrate on - I can take a look at that at least.

> I'm now super busy with several contracts at once and have no time to
> volunteer any more to the IRTC.

I completely understand. I've got some spare time right now, but it won't
necessarily last!

> Now, if anyone out there wants to take it over, be my guest.  I can make
> all of the Smalltalk code available to you if you wish.

Can you mail me a fileout or Monticello snapshot? I'm using Pharo here.

> I tried, folks, but the rewards were too small, the effort was too high,
> and the complaints from people not satisfied with the efforts we put in
> were too annoying.

That's OK - I have a high tolerance for complaints, and if I am going to put the
time in, I'll post with progress, and be as upfront as I can about when I have
no time on it.

> David Buck

Cheers,
Edouard.

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