A screencast of these instructions is available on Vimeo (compressed) or full-size (11.8 MB).

In a recent post I described how to set up Apache and GemStone/S on Slicehost and we ended with running Seaside. This post will describe how to connect to your GLASS system from GemTools and update Seaside (and related packages) to the latest release.

In a local shell, we log in to the Slicehost server using SSH (earlier I described an alias ‘slice’ that I have for this command):

  • ssh -p 30000 glass@slice

Once connected we run a script to set some environment variables and verify that the system is running:

  • source /opt/gemstone/product/seaside/defSeaside
  • gslist

If gslist does not show the appropriate processes, start them:

  • startGemstone
  • runSeasideGems start

The next step is to start the NetLDI service. This service listens on a port (during our initial setup the script defined 50377 as the port for NetLDI), starts gems in guest mode with the glass account, and uses a special port range (in our case one port, 50378, use more if there will be many concurrent connections) to communicate with the newly-started gem.

  • startnetldi -g -a glass -p 50378:50378

Now we can return to our client environment and start GemTools. GemTools is a Squeak application available from the downloads page at seaside.gemstone.com. In GemTools we need to identify the GLASS host by IP address or host name. In my case I’ve added ‘slice’ to my hosts file so I can give the host name. Click the “Login” button to connect to GemStone.

On the Transcript window there are a row of buttons. Click “Monticello” to open a Monticello browser. In this browser we have a list of the packages currently installed in our system. Select the GLASS package on the left pane and note the list of servers for that package in the right pane. Select the http server and click the “Open” button. This will open a new window with the packages available on that server in the left pane and a list of versions in the right pane. Select the latest one (at the top), and click the “Load” button. Each of these steps is somewhat slow, so be patient. Once the package is loaded, you can close the Monticello browsers.

From the Transcript, you can click “Browse” to browse code and you can execute Smalltalk code in the text entry widget.

This use of GemTools will form the basis of much of what we do later in developing a Seaside application in GLASS.