[Seaside] Survey

[Avi Bryant]

On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Keith P. Hodges wrote:

> 3. Is there some long term vision/goal that seaside is working towards?

That's an interesting question.  I tend to think in terms of immediate
needs rather than long term visions.  I have a need, as do various others
I work with and for, to quickly, robustly, and maintainably build business
applications for delivery over the web.  As specific requirements come up
related to individual applications being built, Seaside will be extended
to support them.  I could give you a list of a few such requirements so
that you can see where Seaside might be going in the near future, but
that's more about release planning than vision.

Given that, I guess you could say that the long term vision is this: to
become a repository of as much knowledge as possible related to
effectively building web applications, and to enable that knowledge to be
leveraged by others.  There's also an inherent belief that the best way to
capture that knowledge is by building ever more layers of abstraction on
top of the core protocols, so that the developer has less and less need to
interact directly with HTML and HTTP.

Of course, that's nebulous enough that it could describe almost any
project or framework out there - but that's what you get when you ask
about vision ;).

Alternatively, and more concretely - I really enjoy building tools and
frameworks to support other developers, and I love working with systems
and communities as vibrant as Squeak is.  Partly, then, Seaside (along
with other tools such as DVS, Monticello, Tantalus, Roe, etc) is a vehicle
to allow me and/or others to get paid to hack on Squeak, and the vision is
that all of us would be able to do this full time.  I'm actually
pleasantly surprised by the extent to which this is already happening,
though we're clearly not all the way there yet.

Cheers,
Avi