[Seaside] Developer section on Swiki

[Avi Bryant]

On Sun, 29 Sep 2002, Derek Brans wrote:

> My biggest handicap to helping more is the lack of Squeak and Seaside
> documentation.  Even code comments would be useful.  Has commenting code
> gone out of style recently?

Yes: http://www.xprogramming.com/Practices/PracComments.html  ;-)

> What does the "IA" prefix mean?

Officially, it stands for "Interface Aubergines", since Seaside is the
web interface part of the mythical Squeak Enterprise Aubergines project.
As it happens, Seaside grew out of an earlier framework I wrote called
Iowa, and IA is the postal abbrevation for that state.

Seaside 2.0 classes have a WA prefix, which I suppose stands for Web
Aubergine.  Any resemblance to NeXT's prefixing scheme for WebObjects is
purely coincidental.

> How do you pronounce Borges and what does it mean?

"bor-hez" would be a vague approximation.  Jorge Luis Borges was an
Argentinian writer;  I refer you to his story "The Garden of Forking
Paths", which, written before either the web browser
or the "many worlds" theory of quantum mechanics, describes what I see as
the most interesting and challenging aspect of web application
development:

	In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses
	one at the expense of the others.  In the almost unfathomable
	Ts'ui Pen, he chooses - simultaneously - all of them.  He thus
	_creates_ various futures, various times which start others that
	will in turn branch out and bifurcate in other times...

The main purpose of the Borges layer of Seaside 2.0 is, of course, to
support the parallel, forking control flow inherent in the web environment
through the use of continuations and state snapshotting.

> The tutorials have been
> excellent, fun and instructive with great examples, but we need lots
> more.  Avi, if you want to sit down for a couple hours and explain some
> stuff to me, I will gladly help with documentation.  Better
> documentation means more people know what they are doing and can help
> out.

I'm acutely aware of the need for more documentation.  I hope to spend
some of next week writing some; if you're willing to contribute some
time as well, great.

Cheers,
Avi