[Seaside] What do you use seaside for?

Cees de Groot cg at cdegroot.com
Sat Aug 16 12:18:01 CEST 2003


On Wed, 2003-08-06 at 08:15, jennyw wrote:
> I noticed that Gardner is kind of a CMS-like Seaside
> app., but looking at www.tric.nl I wonder what Google, for example,
> could do with it (I suspect not much). 
>
The order I'm tackling these problems is:
1. Find best application suite -> Seaside
2. Write website -> www.tric.nl
3. Handle all the very valid issues you mentioned ;-)

You may not know this, but Seaside pages are bookmarkable. If you use an
invalid (expired, probably) session id, you are thrown back to the entry
point of the Seaside app you pointed at; with the extra information that
Gardner stashes in the URL (every app is free to put stuff there), you
are immediately brought to the correct page. 

An alternative, of course, would be to revert to the old method of
stashing all this stuff in cookies. However, I've been bitten by session
cookies, broken proxy caches, and whatnot, so the current method is much
more likely to work across a range of configurations (Avi, were there
any other issues with the session-in-cookie method?). For CMS-like
systems, it might be an idea to put sessions in cookies nevertheless,
because the worst case scenario for a Gardner site (for example) would
be that 'advanced features' won't work. 

For Google (and search engines in general) it might be an idea (if
session cookies aren't an option) to keep a list of spider names around
and present them with a special cookie - the search engines would have
fixed URLs so they'd be happy, and if a real browser hits the site with
the special cookie you can redirect to a fresh session. If we make a
little knowledge base of spider UA's we could even standardize this
inside Seaside. If you have WASession>>isSearchEngine around, you can do
all sort of nifty stuff around search-engine optimization, like
presenting a static page explaining the app instead of the app itself. 

Anyway, look at the order of my decision-making process, realize that
Seaside is well-written and open source, and think again about the
validity of an unfounded blanket statement like 'Seaside is not for
static sites' (sorry, Julian ;-))

(because, IMNSHO, there's no such thing as a static *living* site)



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