I was wondering if you could reveal any grand plans you might have for the future of Aida?

What I like about Aida compared to Seaside is its relative simplicity and portability. Seaside uses features of Smalltalk that are not really portable between smalltalks to do its magic (continuations and pragmas being the big ones that I've noticed, which prevent it from being used fully in Dolphin, for example). 

It feels to me like Aida doesn't try to reinvent too many wheels, meaning it's a bit more accessible to people coming from, say, Rails, like myself. It has relatively more steak than sizzle, whereas Seaside has relatively more sizzle than steak. I like my steak rare ("still twitching" is what I tell waitresses at restaurants), so I don't care about sizzle so much. That said, my favourite way to prepare steak is 'black and blue' -- but it takes a rather industrial-size furnace to cook it that way, but, working for a charity, I usually only have a couple matches and a little kindling to start my fire pit. ;)

What I don't like about Aida is the documentation, which is a bit scattered by topic and somewhat stream of consciousness. Seaside has Aida beat hands-down in this department. There are books, well-designed tutorials, lots of samples, etc. It's actually very hard, if you're me, to ignore that big plus for Seaside.

I think Aida needs a much better, much more in-depth tutorial, that really highlights its best parts, and suggests where it's going to get better over time. I am not sure I like all the parts of Aida included -- for example, I've been reviewing the (very involved) Parties/Roles packages and it encroaches a lot on my domain model, meaning I either have to use all of it or none of it. But maybe I have misinterpreted its design? Maybe it's better than my slogging in the code has revealed, and I should use it? Some documentation about the rationale for the abstractions chosen and how they're implemented would be nice.

What I'd like to see in Aida is a greater commitment to REST and maybe XMLRPC API support (seems you're working on that one quite aggressively), more of an MVP vs MVC pattern for rendering, and perhaps support for rich web clients a la Amber (I see there is WebDAV support in Aida, so perhaps you're already intending to go that route), and better security (I really need to support HTTPS, and support API keys securely). Seaside has done a good job in its HTML API, but Aida's abstractions feel somewhat heavy (gazillions of methods). Some refactoring of that seems like it could be good.

Neither framework handles layouts, look-feel, or any of the design intensive side of web development as nicely as I imagine it could be done. This could be an area for huge win in Aida, as I see you've tried to make it easy to reskin a site by supplying a new web style. However, I tried doing this with the demo app and only just mucked stuff up. Again, good documentation about this important area of implementation and some idea of what the end-goal is for it would be awesome.

I'm willing to contribute but I need to get up and running and confident in what I'm doing still. It's been a bit of a ramp up. But I think I'll do well with this choice for what I need to do. I would just like to know what the future holds as I think there is still a lot of room for innovation in web development, and it doesn't all have to be heretical to be on the bleeding edge, so to speak. I'll feel better about Aida knowing that it's roadmap is a good one.

- Bob