Ramon Leon discusses a simple ActiveRecord style persistence for Seaside. I like this from his introduction:

Let's be honest, most apps don’t need to scale. Most apps in the real world are written to run small businesses, what DHH calls the fortune five million. The simple fact is, in all likelihood scaling is not and probably won'€™t ever be your problem. We might like to think we're writing the next YouTube or Twitter, but odds are we're not. You can make a career just replacing spread sheets from hell with simple applications that make people lives easier without ever once hitting the limits of a single Squeak image (such was the inspiration for DabbleDb), so don'€™t waste your time scaling.

This is especially true of intranet web apps. There's more complexity involved in many of those than I'd like to imagine. I recall a recent conversation where a guy was discussing his scaling needs: he wanted transparent fal-over, session preservation (etc, etc). We asked how many users his system might have - he said it might be 500 or so.... which a single image Seaside app would probably handle fine, assuming enough memory.

People have been oversold on scaling needs much of the time. Sure, you don't want to be caught with your pants down, like Twitter. But for most apps, it's not even a possibility...

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