[Seaside] Seaside2: separation between content and presentation

[tblanchard@mac.com]

On Monday, December 2, 2002, at 12:28  AM, Avi Bryant wrote:
> Also, if I may ask, just out of curiosity: what would it require for 
> you
> to start doing some contracts with Seaside rather than WebObjects?  I
> imagine it's a fairly long list, but I'd love to know what it was.
>

Here's my impression (since I'm currently doing WO for money but 
looking for alternatives after the crippling java port).

Seaside seems to solve the session management bit very nicely and in a 
very novel way.  Better than the WO approach.  Using WO back tracking 
is a bit of a problem and I routinely force the user to get a new 
session often because its not that hard to screw one up after awhile.  
(A session lasts for a task - no longer).  The rest of user state is 
either in the database or in a cookie.

WO adds EOF.  EOF is a really amazing Object to Relational mapping 
architecture.
Without EOF I probably wouldn't bother with WO but EOF is where the 
real value is.

I'm looking at glorp but its rather intimidating (lots of this squeak 
stuff is - good examples are scarce).  WO provides nifty bindings to 
EOF via keypaths (which I noticed somewhere you have) and handles db 
connection pooling.  So that's a big advantage.

Seaside doesn't address database access at all directly.  WO also has a 
great set of components - something we can address in time I hope.

Those are two of the biggest items - getting db access and it feels a 
bit like the model view separation is still not quite cooked.

One other nifty thing WO does is sit behind a conventional web server 
via a CGI, modapache, or nsapi adaptor that does load balancing across 
several application instances.  I don't know what the load balancing 
strategy for Seaside is.  How do you scale it up?  I'm also not 
convinced that Commanche is nearly as robust as apache both stability 
wise and performance wise.  For smaller sites, this isn't likely a big 
deal.  But I know how to scale huge WO apps - can't say I can say the 
same for Seaside.

But of course, I'm just learning (and really likiing) it.

Todd Blanchard