[Seaside] Ports of Seaside - are there useful modules

[Avi Bryant]

On Mon, 22 Apr 2002, Jeffrey Odell wrote:

> It seems that the unique session management concept of Seaside depends
> on continuations.  If your favorite Smalltalk doesn't have them, porting
> is inhibited.
>
> Having said that, how modular is Seaside?  Are there other subsystems of
> Seaside worth porting to other Smalltalks that are useful on their own
> right?  Or is the essential value lost without continuations?

Well, Seaside is roughly based on the design of WebObjects, which doesn't
use continuations; the templates and bindings system, the subcomponent
model, the basic session management, etc, would all work without them:
basically you would have to lose the callPage: primitive, but you'd still
have jumpToPage:, and you can do a lot with that.  It's still a lot nicer
than, say, SSP.

However, I'd say that continuations make up about half of the advantage
of Seaside; that is, Seaside + continuations is, IMHO, about as much nicer
to work in than WebObjects, as WebObjects is nicer to work in than JSP &
co.  So there'd have to be a pretty compelling reason for me to work in a
Smalltalk without them - the choice of Squeak or VW meets my needs pretty
well.

Does anyone know if continuations can be implemented in VisualAge, anyway?
I believe it has thisContext and #swapSender:, does it not?
I can post a small TestCase for them if anyone wants to try.

Cheers,
Avi