[Seaside-dev] tasks without flow

[Julian Fitzell]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 4:15 PM, Lukas Renggli <renggli at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Do we really want to continue supporting WATask in Seaside 3.0? They
>>> make things so much more complicated than necessary and are rarely
>>> useful.
>>
>> Why not?...
>
> They make a good demo, but in practice I've rarely found tasks useful.
>
> In most cases a flow has very few steps (2 or 1) and is triggered
> through a callback. This makes it much simpler to simply put it into a
> callback method, instead of creating a new class, implementing some
> methods, instantiating that class and passing the arguments.
>
> I think the only time I used a task was for a Tic-Tac-Toe game, where
> it was used as the controller mediating between the computer and
> player.

I suspect they are helpful for people migrating legacy (non-web)
systems and others may write applications in different styles than
you. But this is speculation by both of us and would be fairly easily
verified by asking our users.

Still, I don't think we should be discussing taking them out moments
before going to beta. I also don't think they add much complexity -
they have been getting simpler and simpler throughout this version and
I have one more change that gets rid of the looping stuff in #execute
without sacrificing functionality so that's even less. Really, it's
just a simple Component subclass and an extra (very simple) visitor
that gets run after each action phase.

We can certainly have a discussion about its value but let's (a) leave
it for later and (b) make sure it is informed by actual data from our
user base as to whether they find it useful.

Julian