[Seaside] [BUG] Tutorial 2 report

[Avi Bryant]

On Sun, 26 May 2002, Jim Benson wrote:

<snip very useful suggestions for the tutorials>

Thanks, those were very useful suggestions for the tutorials.

> BUG:
>
> The "Bounding The Back Button" section did not work at all on my setup. I'm
> using Squeak 3.2 gamma-4857, Comanche 5.0 and IE 6.0.026 on a Windows XP
> box. The user can still navigate as before the #isolate: call was added.

Interesting.  I'll see if I can replicate it.
Incidentally, does the "txn=..." part of the url change at all while
you're trying this?

> Let's see, he could basically kick anybodies ass doing web development
> because of S-Exprs and Continuations. I needed an evolved Wiki type of
> application, and I shuddered at the thought of developing in the Swiki
> environment. This is due mostly because Swiki has decoupled itself from the
> Smalltalk development environment by putting all of the code out in separate
> files. The Swiki didn't have S-Exprs or Continuations, I would have to write
> those myself. I was alone in the world.
>
> Then I remembered the Seaside talks on the Squeak mailing list. I read
> through the tutorials and the mailing lists and I saw my new friends S-Exprs
> and Continuations, right here, right now. Right now I'm as happy as a pig in
> slop, I can't wait to get my little apps up and running.

This is not coincidental, of course.  I happened to be working with Lisp
and reading Paul Graham's articles at the same time that I was porting
IOWA from Ruby to Squeak; somewhere in there was an "aha!" moment, the
Lisp gods clashed briefly with the Smalltalk gods and in a great flash of
lightning, Seaside was born... or something like that.  I tend to think of
Lisp and Smalltalk as two great civilizations that came from common
ancestors but have since forgotten each other.  Seaside steals equally
from both traditions.

<ramble>
It would be very cool to see some kind of super-seaside-wiki evolve.  One
small thing I've considered in this direction is adding a WikiParser to go
with the standard html parser and sexpr parser.  This would create normal
Seaside templates (perhaps with a special WikiWordElement?) from
wiki-formatted text.  I like the idea of people being able to throw
Seaside components into their Wiki pages, presumably all templates on some
generic WikiComponent class... I don't *think* they could do too much
damage if you didn't let them write actual code.  But it gets fuzzy if I
try to think too much beyond that.

Of course, with something similar to the /browser example, you could allow
some kind of controlled web-based code writing as well.  If only the
<textarea> widget wasn't so emasculated on most web browsers... what I
would give for Mozilla and IE to introduce a tag for a decent editor.
Doesn't have to be emacs or anything, just something you can type tabs
into...
</ramble>

Avi