> Janko,
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
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