devblog.brahmancreations.com

I blogged a few months ago about the Scaffold Shuffle and now I think I have found the framework which will probably make all that go away, Seaside.

This is a framework which has been around for a number of years, written in Smalltalk which has been around even longer, a veritable Daddy among OOP languages.

Seaside has been overshadowed by Rails, Django, CakePHP, but once you see it and try it, it feels so clean that you wonder why it hasn't caught on as well. DHH's videos and the Rails advocates promotion is probably why, and probably because Ruby runs from the command console without the need for a GUI. What may deter possible users is the apparent lack of third party libraries for Smalltalk that the other languages have acquired, but on closer look they all seem to be there, only they may not be getting the regular updates that one finds with the other languages.

Java and Eclipse owe their existence to Smalltalk related developments and sometimes you wonder if Java wasn't a conspiracy to hold back Web development. Of course it could be that Smalltalk users created Java to divert attention from what a good thing they had in Smalltalk itself ;-). If only the major companies weren't so interested in spoiling their competitor's lunches.

The most popular Web languages have Java implementations, JRuby, Jython, Quercus(PHP), give users of those languages the safety of knowing that any libraries they might need will be present in Java. Googling around indicated that the nature of Java would make it hard to develop a good Smalltalk in Java. That being the case why don't things get turned around for the other languages to be developed in Smalltalk, Java included, thus making it turtles all the way down?

There is no need to write to much about it, just download it and try it yourself and you will make much better progress with it than with Rails. I never got going with Rails probably because I am lazy, but I found its files too all over the place for my liking. You would think that after buying the book I would make a good attempt to try it, but I never got down to it.
Seaside's developers were probably too busy using it, than blogging about it and attacking Java from all sides.

Getting Started
First download the Seaside One-Click Experience and install it on your system. It is a simple extraction from the archive into a directory of your choice.

When it comes to tutorials illustrating simple applications - the two I have tried are Learning Web Development with Seaside from Gemstone GLASS and the second is ToDo Application Tutorial from the Hasso-Plattner-Institut (University of Potsdam).

Being new to both Smalltalk and Seaside I found the former easier to learn from, as it taught the basics of Smalltalk and the Squeak environment, in addition to Seaside. The ToDo Application is short but useful introduction into the more advanced concepts of Seaside development, including Persistence, ORM and framework generators, Magritte in this case.
Don't overlook the website's own introductory material. Getting to grips to the above two would have been easier if I had gone through it first. I was just too eager to see something working, as you might be.