#GLASS, Seaside, Web Edition Terminology In the existing body of documentation and product artifacts you will see references to GLASS, Seaside and Web Edition. At the end of the day, these terms all refer to the same thing, which we are now calling the Web Edition.
In the beginning, Seaside was provided pre-installed in the
$GEMSTONE/bin/extent0.seaside.dbf extent file and it was appropriate to
use Seaside to describe the product and many of the product artifects and
early documentation were created with Seaside in the name.
Around the same time, in the very early days, GLASS was invented as an acronym standing for Gemstone, Linux, Apache, Seaside, Smalltalk and GLASS was then used in more documentation.
After a couple of years it became obvious that it wasn't practical to ship
Seaside pre-installed in the GemStone product tree (in
$GEMSTONE/bin/extent0.seaside.dbf) as Seaside evolved at a different
pace than the GemStone product releases. In addition, new releases of Seaside
were not necessarily backward compatible with older releases which made it
necessary to uninstall Seaside from extent0.seaside.dbf before installing
a new version of Seaside. Finally there were other web frameworks like Aida
and iliad that were not necessarily compatible with Seaside, so the
decision was made to not include Seaside in the extent0.seaside.dbf.
In actual fact, the code in extent0.seaside.dbf was divided into two very
distinct layers. The Squeak/Pharo compatibility layer and the Seaside code base.
The Squeak/Pharo compatibility layer made the job of porting applications
developed in Squeak or Pharo much easier, so there was real utility to
providing that layer separate from Seaside.
In the documentation, I began calling the compatibility layer GLASS. The split was announced in July of 2010.
For a variety of reasons (none of them good reasons), the product artifacts retained their original names, while I continued to the the GLASS acronym to describe the compatibility layer code.
Today I am starting an effort to slowly rename and rebrand the compatibility layer as the Web Edition. The product artifacts will change with the next major release of GemStone (beyond 3.2) and as the documentation is consolidated in the Web Edition Home, the terminology will be corrected.
Until then, please bear with me.