[Seaside] Tutorial One

[Jim Benson]

I just went through Tutorial One, and am sending my report.

Everything worked OK, except for:

I am using Comanche 5.0 ; I had to go to the mailing list and try to grab
the appropriate update from one of the mailing list messages.
Unfortunately, using the mailing list you have to
"de-un-mime-alate-aticulate" the MIME attachment for the changeset. It
actually took me longer to find a program that de-mimed the attachment
properly (on my machine, only three different programs and tries ;-)  than
to go through the tutorial itself. It would be nice to leave this on the
Swiki or somewhere so that us more challenged folks have a chance to get it.

Comments:

There's a *lot* of magic going on here. That's good. One place I did get
confused was in the "Getting Fancier: Bindings".  A lot of things get talked
about, and suddenly the #addBindingsTo: method is introduced. Initially, it
wasn't quite clear to me where I should place the method. Also, it wasn't
clear to me when or who sends this message so that it "just works". The
first can be fixed by saying "Add this method to [classname]", the second
can be answered with a quick "the binding happens when ... ". Of course, I
eventually hunted down what was going on, but a couple of extra sentences
would have cleared it up for me.

Another area that I'm having trouble with is the syntax/options of the <
input .. > command in the templates. I'm not quite sure what all of the
different options are other than what I've seen in the examples. I've looked
at most of the examples, and a swiki page with the syntax options of the
various Seaside elements would be very helpful. For example, I couldn't
figure out how to work the IATabTest example.

This holds true of the S-Expr expansion, I'll write about that in another
email.

The radioButton -> menu example in the templates is a great demo.

The tutorial is well done.

Down by the Seaside:

The use of continuations in Seaside is an exemplary use of the power of
Squeak (OK, it might have been lifted out of Lisp ;-) in this problem
domain. Kudos !!! The use of S-Expr has a very good feeling to it also as a
higher level domain language of HTML, though it's clear that some sort of
editor support is needed to match the parens (an alternative might be some
sort of domain specific editor).

Has anyone written a Wiki in Seaside yet?

It's good to see people with brains working in this area. Is it too late to
change my vote for Squeaker(s) of the year?

Jim