Comparing Illiad to Aida/Web

I'm still using Iliad as my main web framework in real-world projects, and find the current release to be stable and complete enough for any purpose. However, I guess it's true that *all* server-side web frameworks are obsolete and we should be moving to more modern approaches.

I'm eagerly waiting for the day a packaged, easy solution comes out that allows us to program the client side in Amber and the server side in whatever else, probably using websockets instead of (obsolete too?) HTTP requests, but in the meantime I'll stick to Iliad when I need heavy server logic, and to Amber when I just need client-side logic.

In regard to the original questions in this thread, I haven't digged into Aida further than writing a Hello World app and reading through the example site, but I have been a Seaside user and switched to Iliad about a year and a half ago, so I guess I can talk a bit about these two.

Iliad feels way lighter and faster, ajax comes for free and the whole library takes a really short time to read through. Formula is easy and much quicker to "get" than pure Magritte. In general, I'd say Iliad is more pragmatic and focused on getting things done, quick and simple. Very much in the approach of "simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible".

On the other hand, in Seaside you'll have an astronomically bigger community (in the scale of Smalltalk communities), meaning you'll find many more components, support, examples, etc. In my first Iliad apps I felt a bit alone in the wild, but even though this is a tiny community, most of my questions were answered and in the end I learned to find my way through almost any issue.

Right now I can say I'm really happy I made my mind up and switched. Whenever I miss any of Seaside's features, I just code it away while marking my widgets dirty and remembering what a trip to hell was achieving integration with ajax in Seaside ;)

Hope it helped!

Bernat.

2012/3/26 Thiago Lino <[hidden email]>

Hi list,

Iliad is a great web framework (simple, small and easy/ready-to-use-ajax), has a very helpfull community.

IMHO is important to iliad community (and newcomers) to know the plans for iliad.
1 - Last oficial release was a year ago.
2 - there are a big movement to amber + seaside/seaside-rest-api (for instance: Smalltalkhub wich was an ilad project. please, correct if i am wrong).


cheers,
Thiago da Silva Lino

On Monday, March 19, 2012 8:25:37 AM UTC-3, Runar Jordahl wrote:

I am looking into both Iliad and Aida/Web. My first reaction is that
both frameworks have functions which are better than those found in
Seaside. Embedding a sub component in a page, and have that component
update itself without making a full page refresh, is one example. This
worked out-of-the-box in Aida, and possibly in Iliad too. With Seaside
it was possible, but harder.

My main concern about Aida is that I think it is too coupled. There
seems to be few attempts to layer the system, and some components are
included whether you need them or not:
- Access control
- Image save/image backup
- Location services
- Styling

One thing I like about Seaside is that I can start with a very simple
"hello world" web page, and gradually add CSS, login, headers,
JavaScript, etc. With Aida I find this harder. It is more the opposite
approach, where I start with a decorated page, and have to remove the
components listed above.

Iliad seems more in line with Seaside: With Iliad I can build my pages
up without worrying about functions being included against my will.
For me this is a plus. From my understanding, Iliad is based on Aida’s
ideas but tries to make a more general framework. It can more easily
evolve into a pluggable system than Aida (currently) is able to.
Is this understanding correct?

Please note that I do not want to downplay Aida's contribution to
Smalltalk. From what I understand, Janko came up with a lot of the
concepts found in Iliad.

One thing I really like about Aida is that its developer seems to be
planning for new features. I do not get the same impression looking at
Iliad's web pages.
Does Iliad have any plan for new features?
Will Iliad for example someday integrate with Amber?

Kind regards
Runar

--
Bernat Romagosa.