A look at seaside and pharo from a Rails/Ruby perspective

Hi,

It's always interesting how things are seen from the outside...
(from http://on-ruby.blogspot.com/2010/08/rubyweb-interview-with-pat-maddox.html
seems there will be a  talk about seaside at a ruby conference early september...)


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Seaside is interesting technology, how did you discover it?
------------------------------------------------------------
Pat Seaside is a fascinating and fun technology!! I came across it a few
years ago, not long after I got into Rails. Over the years I had a couple
of false starts with it...it's a bit opaque at first because the
development environment is so different from anything I'm used to. And
it's only fairly recently with Pharo that it's become easier to get
started, because it's such a clean environment geared towards development.
Also the documentation for both Pharo and Seaside are getting really good.
There are free books on each at pharobyexample.org and
book.seaside.st/book.

Okay as for what's so interesting to me about Seaside... it's 50% the
framework and 50% the Pharo environment. Seaside itself represents a step
forward in web development similar to how Rails did. Rails takes care of a
lot of the plumbing for you - you don't have to parse query params, set up
response headers, manage the session (unless you want to of course).
Seaside does all that of course but also manages application state for
you. So you don't have to worry about putting stuff into a database, then
pulling it back out and operating on it. I can't do it justice in a few
sentences, but that's why I'll be showing lots of examples at the
conference! :) At any rate, that same feeling you get when you code Rails
for the first time and see how much easier things are, you get that same
feeling with Seaside. It's not a replacement for Rails by any means -
Rails definitely has a sweet spot, particularly when it comes to RESTful
websites and interoperability with the unix ecosystem - but for the things
that Seaside is strong at (which for me so far has been complex and/or
configurable workflows), it runs circles around everything else. The other
thing I'm loving about Seaside development is Pharo, an open-source
smalltalk environment. Smalltalk is a great language, and Pharo has great
tools that allow you to discover everything in the system. Honestly it
makes RubyMine or etags look plain silly. The best bit is that nearly
everything in Pharo is implemented in smalltalk, including all of the
tools. So if you want to see the mechanics of a refactoring tool, and even
build your own, it's trivial to do so, because it's just smalltalk code.

Wow this answer got long. I could go on all day about this stuff. Gonna
stop now.
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--
Marcus Denker  -- http://www.marcusdenker.de
INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD.


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