Seaside on Squeak

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Seaside on Squeak

Torsten Bergmann
>> On 14-01-2014, at 5:17 PM, Colin Putney <colin at wiresong.com> wrote:
>> > Meh. Don't worry about it. Seaside is obsolete anyway.
...
>Yes, but  smart phones are really important now, so "responsive design" is
>the in thing: one UI that scales down to 3" phone and up to 30" monitors.

Colin,

sorry - but in which cave do you live in the last year? ;)

Seaside is alive and well, maybe a little bit more in the background because
you can now also start a webserver in a few lines in groovy, node.js, Pharo Zinc, younameIt
... as well and web development is exploding these days anyway with thousands of
frameworks.

Seaside (similar to Smalltalk) is not the major player but as before it allows for good
componentized web applications and with its dynamic tools helps you if your apps
grow in size.

Dont know for Squeak these days but for Pharo and also commercial ST vendors Seaside is
still alive and still relevant, there is a new maintenance version 3.0.10 version
in the 3.0 path and a shiny new release version 3.1.0 with REST, JSON and many other
new improvements.

For instance alone in germany in 2013 two new online services started with
Seaside last year:

   http://kontolino.de  (using VAST Smalltalk + Seaside)
   http://spesenfuchs.de (using Pharo + Seaside)

One thing I liked most was that Pharo together with Seaside is now also used
to control nanosatellites

  http://de.slideshare.net/nahuelgarbezza/smalltalks-2013-a-web-console-to-control-nanosatellites

Beside commercial projects it was/is used for research projects like

  http://inbug.inf.usi.ch 

for example.

It was used to create SmalltalkHub together with Amber:

   http://smalltalkhub.com/

There are also new hosting options for Seaside since 2013 like

   http://www.pharocloud.com

with easy deployment by just uploading the running image - also supporting Aida and others.

And yes: web applications move also to smaller devices like tablets and
smartphones. You should google for Nick Ager's ESUG presentation on developing
mobile apps with Seaside.

There are new shiny external libraries out there that can be used to provide "responsive design".
And they can easily be used with Seaside too. If you are up to date with web development then
the "Twitter Bootstrap" library should ring some bells since many web pages and web apps
are done with it theses days.

It is available for Seaside too: http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~TorstenBergmann/Bootstrap
Try the bootstrap on top of Seaside demo here:

   http://pharo.pharocloud.com/bootstrap
 
If you want to play with it try in a fresh Pharo 3.0 from http://files.pharo.org and
load it from the config browser "World menu" -> "Configuration browser".


So Seaside is far from being "obsolete" and I'm sure the Seaside community would welcome
if Squeak community would help making it available again for Squeak too since this
would be a valuable addition not only for Seaside but also for Squeak.

And before you declare other Smalltalk web frameworks as "obsolete": also Aida web
framework had a new release in 2013 and Iliad is currently ported to work again on
newest Pharo.

Thx
T.

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Re: Seaside on Squeak

Colin Putney-3



On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 5:36 AM, Torsten Bergmann <[hidden email]> wrote:
 
sorry - but in which cave do you live in the last year? ;)

Easy there, I wasn't trying to be insulting. I'm quite aware that the Seaside community is alive and well, and with all the different dialects it runs on now, it's probably more popular now that it's ever been. By obsolete, I don't mean "dead," I mean that it's no longer cutting-edge web technology. 

Seaside first came out in early 2002. That was almost 14 years ago! At the time, templates were the rule. HTML pages embedded with bits of <?php echo(user.name) ?> code all through them. Ruby was an obscure scripting language that could be used to write CGI programs using webrick. "Serious" web apps were done with Enterprise Java Beans, and Sun Microsystems was flying high. The conventional wisdom was that "shared nothing" app servers were the way to go—each request had to be completely isolated from other requests to keep the server from crashing. Writing web apps involved a *lot* of string manipulation to marshal state into forms and back, encode session ids or database keys into link urls etc.

Seaside was a radical break from all that. It handled state management completely and generated all the identifiers and URLs automatically. That was mind-blowing. It attracted web geeks from all over the place to become interested in Smalltalk and began growing the Squeak ecosystem. (I was one of those people. I learned Smalltalk specifically to write Seaside apps.)

But again, that was 14 years ago. The web has moved on. Javascript frameworks and AJAX make all that state management much simpler and easier to automate. Continuations aren't necessary anymore. These days Seaside isn't drawing web geeks into Smalltalk. In fact it's quite the opposite: Seaside is making web programming accessible to Smalltalk geeks. 

So when I told Chris not to worry about Seaside, what I meant was that we needn't worry that Squeak is missing out on the influx of new developers that Seaside is drawing into the Smalltalk community. Those days are over. What *is* important is that we have options for web development in Squeak, but I think Green Neon, Altitude and yes, Seaside, fill that role nicely.
  
And before you declare other Smalltalk web frameworks as "obsolete": also Aida web
framework had a new release in 2013 and Iliad is currently ported to work again on
newest Pharo.

Actually, I don't think Aida and Iliad are obsolete at all. Iliad in particular, is designed around tight integration between Javascript components on the client and Smalltalk components on the server. That's a completely reasonable strategy for today's web. 

Colin