I see a parallel with what you are saying here about squeak/seaside and my own linux experience.

Due to my main hard disk taking a dive, one month ago, I have found myself having to build my system up from scratch using linux. I myself have attempted to install linux on at least 5 previous occasions, but every time I only got so far before I went back to the familiar old windows or mac os x environments. (My mac g4 died 2 years ago). Despite working in a Unix/perl shop for 5 years, I still found linux installation and admin too painful. (I now know why - one non-pnp network card had me stumped) This time I did have the benefit of a working pc with which to browse the net looking for advice.

Finally I have done it... the difference this time is Knoppix! The Live-CD.

I started with knoppix which ran, without touching my broken installation. Since then I have slowly migrated my previous working environment accross, bit by bit. First email, then music, then squeak. I now have booted the knoppix dvd image on my hard disk with some 10G of unix stuff preloaded, and I am fairly impressed.

I am coming around to the live CD idea as a way of demonstrating, I think it might be a good idea to do one based upon dreamlinux.

just an idea for the pot

Keith

I sensed enough goodwill, and got enough concrete offers to publish articles/books/etc, to think that the opportunity is there to get a mainstream audience for Seaside *if* (and this is a fairly large if) we want it and have the resources to put into it. What it would take, I think, is a custom Squeak distribution and tutorial/screencast that was aimed at a non-Smalltalk audience. It would need to cover:

• The browser
• The workspace
• Saving, loading, and merging in Monticello
• The basics of Seaside (a revamped "Walk on the Seaside" tutorial

would be fine)

___________________________________________________________ All new Yahoo! Mail "The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use." - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html

Thanks for the update Avi. Good to hear. I've been convinced for a long time that the more attention Ruby/Python get the better off Smalltalk is. It will help to break the static branches of programming and will bring a larger mind share into the late-binding camping.

I've got a screencast in the queue to address the issue of learning Smalltalk. This is motived by Ralph Johnson's post (http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-May/104071.htm). Smalltalk is so radically different that the conventional ways of learning a new programming language are not applicable. Tutorials and api documentation are the main ways of learning most envirionments. In Smalltalk, the trick is learning how to browse the image and experiment with running code using the workspace and the inspectors. I think this is more effective once you figure out how to do it.

The thing that is killing me with Rails is not being able to read the code I'm relying on. I can open a text on editor on the source once I find it, but this brutally primitive compared to what comes for free with Smalltalk. Porting ActiveRecord to Smalltalk with its own browser would really leap frog what is available in Ruby. Someone will write a good IDE for Ruby and Rails. It's inevitable. However, given the heavy reliance on runtime code generation in both Ruby and Rails, it seems to me to be a really challenging prospect. Not only do you have to deal with dynamic typing. The definition of a lot classes only exist at runtime. In Smalltalk, we can do that, but it is done far less frequently than in Ruby. I would rather just port ActiveRecord.

I'll get a screencast together tomorrow and post a link on this list and squeak-dev for feedback.

- Wilkes

BTW, I prefer Sails to StOR.

On 7/29/06, Avi Bryant avi.bryant@gmail.com wrote:

Since this StOR thread seems to be about reaching an audience we haven't had before, it's probably worth mentioning what I've been up to for the last week.

I've just returned from the O'Reilly's open source OSCON conference. I gave a talk on Seaside very intentionally angled not towards convincing people to jump ship from Python/Perl/Rails etc, but rather towards getting them to consider some of the basic technologies - like the the Canvas, Component, Callback and Continuation model (hm, never noticed all those C's before) - for use in their environment of choice. However, interest was high enough that:

• I gave a 45 minute talk to a packed room (some good photos at

http://flickr.com/photos/jacobian/)

• followed by about 30 minutes of Q&A with most people still in the room
• followed by 3 hours of conversation with a large group at dinner

about Seaside and Smalltalk

• followed by a subset of that group tracking me down first thing the

next morning and making me spend another couple of hours doing a Squeak demo

What I found is that a) a huge number of these people have tried Squeak before, and that b) they were all very excited by what they saw in my (very simple) demo, but none of them had been able to make the journey themselves from the one to the other - that is, it was impossible for them to just download a Squeak image and, with no prior Smalltalk experience, find their way through a Hello World Seaside app. So they decided Squeak wasn't for them. There's also a huge amount of confusion and disinformation about the state of things like version control: essentially everyone seems to believe that the image is the only way to distribute Smalltalk code, and is understandably leery of this.

I sensed enough goodwill, and got enough concrete offers to publish articles/books/etc, to think that the opportunity is there to get a mainstream audience for Seaside *if* (and this is a fairly large if) we want it and have the resources to put into it. What it would take, I think, is a custom Squeak distribution and tutorial/ screencast that was aimed at a non-Smalltalk audience. It would need to cover:

• The browser
• The workspace
• Saving, loading, and merging in Monticello
• The basics of Seaside (a revamped "Walk on the Seaside" tutorial

would be fine)

An ActiveRecord-like simple O/R framework would certainly help too, but I think the above is a higher priority.

Incidentally, I was asked by a few people at the conference how big the Seaside community was, and I was very pleased to be able to say "well, I almost never post to the list anymore, because other people are doing all the question answering, discussing, and committing". That's pretty cool, and an important threshold to cross, I think.

Avi _______________________________________________ Seaside mailing list Seaside@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

• The browser
• The workspace
• Saving, loading, and merging in Monticello
• The basics of Seaside (a revamped "Walk on the Seaside" tutorial

would be fine)

Avi

You're absolutely correct, but I think you need to cover a little more ground on Smalltalk...

- A small lesson in image style development and maintenance, this is a HUGE change for them and needs to be addressed. For a newbie the image is far to easy to crash and recovering changes from the change log isn't something that just jumps out at you, I lost quite a bit of code before discovering the change log.

- Publishing a Seaside app using Apache/Stunnel. They'll freak when they find out Squeak can't do SSL natively, best to acknowledge that early and get them thinking of Seaside as sort of a dynamic page generation framework that you use in conjunction with Apache/Stunnel. If they're coming from a windows background where "lot's of little tools that work well together" is not how things are normally done, they're going to expect Squeak to do everything, I did.

If you do a custom image, there's a few packages that I think a web developer would appreciate pre-installed beyond Seaside/Scriptaculous

- KeyBinder - ODBC - PieChart - PlotMorph - Shout - eCompletion - SoapCoreClient - Yaxo

With maybe a few pre-bound hot keys to get the environment going for them, say for launching Monticello, or maybe opening a browser/transcript/workspace and sizing them appropriately giving it a more traditional IDE feel. Make them feel more comfortable until they get a deeper grasp on how all this stuff really works. Maybe even Cee's Refractoring Browser with most of the Smalltalk categories hidden and only Seaside categories visible initially, might make it seem less daunting.

I think there is a mainstream audience for Seaside as well, I've been showing it off at work lately and interest seems high, people are sick of traditional style web development, most just don't know better things exist. It'd be nice if Smalltalk made a resurgence by showing them the way. I know I'm hooked, this is the language for me, nothing else even comes close.

Avi Bryant wrote:

Since this StOR thread seems to be about reaching an audience we haven't had before, it's probably worth mentioning what I've been up to for the last week.

I've just returned from the O'Reilly's open source OSCON conference. I gave a talk on Seaside very intentionally angled not towards convincing people to jump ship from Python/Perl/Rails etc, but rather towards getting them to consider some of the basic technologies - like the the Canvas, Component, Callback and Continuation model (hm, never noticed all those C's before) - for use in their environment of choice. However, interest was high enough that:

• I gave a 45 minute talk to a packed room (some good photos at

http://flickr.com/photos/jacobian/)

• followed by about 30 minutes of Q&A with most people still in the room
• followed by 3 hours of conversation with a large group at dinner

about Seaside and Smalltalk

• followed by a subset of that group tracking me down first thing the

next morning and making me spend another couple of hours doing a Squeak demo

What I found is that a) a huge number of these people have tried Squeak before, and that b) they were all very excited by what they saw in my (very simple) demo, but none of them had been able to make the journey themselves from the one to the other - that is, it was impossible for them to just download a Squeak image and, with no prior Smalltalk experience, find their way through a Hello World Seaside app. So they decided Squeak wasn't for them. There's also a huge amount of confusion and disinformation about the state of things like version control: essentially everyone seems to believe that the image is the only way to distribute Smalltalk code, and is understandably leery of this.

I sensed enough goodwill, and got enough concrete offers to publish articles/books/etc, to think that the opportunity is there to get a mainstream audience for Seaside *if* (and this is a fairly large if) we want it and have the resources to put into it. What it would take, I think, is a custom Squeak distribution and tutorial/ screencast that was aimed at a non-Smalltalk audience. It would need to cover:

• The browser
• The workspace
• Saving, loading, and merging in Monticello
• The basics of Seaside (a revamped "Walk on the Seaside" tutorial

would be fine)

An ActiveRecord-like simple O/R framework would certainly help too, but I think the above is a higher priority.

Incidentally, I was asked by a few people at the conference how big the Seaside community was, and I was very pleased to be able to say "well, I almost never post to the list anymore, because other people are doing all the question answering, discussing, and committing". That's pretty cool, and an important threshold to cross, I think.

Avi

Thanks by the good news Avi.

Pointing to the same, I've started some time ago a sort of workshops with 3 co-workers that don't know Smalltalk. The goal is teaching the main Smalltalk basic needed to use then Seaside.

The experience is going really good, making corrections by the way.

Using such experience I'm preparing now a sort of "course" to sell here (locally) with me as instructor (may be the next year) that cover the 2 main steps:

1) Teach the basics of Squeak/Smalltalk (The course assume no Smalltalk knowledgment).

2) Teach about web development using, of course, Seaside, Scriptaculous, ShoreComponents, etc.

By now, I'm only preparing such material (and in Spanish) but I agree with your idea of make some effort to get a bigger audience to Seaside.

Then, may be we can get also a bigger attention between the hosting sellers that are not offering Squeak right now. :)

Cheers.

Has anyone heard this (sorry if it was posted before)?

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2006/08/07/distributing-the-future.h... "With all the attention that Ruby on Rails has been getting, have we not been paying enough attention to the Smalltalk Seaside framework? Also, we'll look back at some OSCON moments.(DTF 08-07-2006: 28 minutes 15 seconds)"

Avi Bryant wrote:

Since this StOR thread seems to be about reaching an audience we haven't had before, it's probably worth mentioning what I've been up to for the last week.

I've just returned from the O'Reilly's open source OSCON conference. I gave a talk on Seaside very intentionally angled not towards convincing people to jump ship from Python/Perl/Rails etc, but rather towards getting them to consider some of the basic technologies - like the the Canvas, Component, Callback and Continuation model (hm, never noticed all those C's before) - for use in their environment of choice. However, interest was high enough that:

• I gave a 45 minute talk to a packed room (some good photos at

http://flickr.com/photos/jacobian/)

• followed by about 30 minutes of Q&A with most people still in the room
• followed by 3 hours of conversation with a large group at dinner

about Seaside and Smalltalk

• followed by a subset of that group tracking me down first thing the

next morning and making me spend another couple of hours doing a Squeak demo

What I found is that a) a huge number of these people have tried Squeak before, and that b) they were all very excited by what they saw in my (very simple) demo, but none of them had been able to make the journey themselves from the one to the other - that is, it was impossible for them to just download a Squeak image and, with no prior Smalltalk experience, find their way through a Hello World Seaside app. So they decided Squeak wasn't for them. There's also a huge amount of confusion and disinformation about the state of things like version control: essentially everyone seems to believe that the image is the only way to distribute Smalltalk code, and is understandably leery of this.

I sensed enough goodwill, and got enough concrete offers to publish articles/books/etc, to think that the opportunity is there to get a mainstream audience for Seaside *if* (and this is a fairly large if) we want it and have the resources to put into it. What it would take, I think, is a custom Squeak distribution and tutorial/screencast that was aimed at a non-Smalltalk audience. It would need to cover:

• The browser
• The workspace
• Saving, loading, and merging in Monticello
• The basics of Seaside (a revamped "Walk on the Seaside" tutorial

would be fine)

An ActiveRecord-like simple O/R framework would certainly help too, but I think the above is a higher priority.

Incidentally, I was asked by a few people at the conference how big the Seaside community was, and I was very pleased to be able to say "well, I almost never post to the list anymore, because other people are doing all the question answering, discussing, and committing". That's pretty cool, and an important threshold to cross, I think.

Avi _______________________________________________ Seaside mailing list Seaside@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside