[Seaside] presentation/logic separation XMLC style (Was Re: Hopelessly stupid newbie question)

[Cees de Groot]

On Wed, 2003-03-12 at 05:27, Brian Zhou wrote:
> Allow me to offer one more approach - the approach XMLC
> http://xmlc.enhydra.org has taken. Basically,
> 
Too damn hard. I've been at this game quite long - I was on the WWW when
all there was was a demo HTTP server at CERN which I could access
through X.25 and a public VMS account on a CERN box ;-). 

Look at a website with lots of design - the kind that typically is given
as a defense for templates or other 'designer round-trip' systems - like
http://webmail.444.net/ (this one I just happen to know a bit better
than other sites ;-)). Looks nice (as long as you're in IE), and it is
completely generated. The designer makes the design, which doesn't
happen more than once or twice a year (that's just sound brand
management), I reverse engineer it (need to do that in any case, unless
any of you have a magic way to generate dynamic tab forms ;-)) and from
that point on, the design is absorbed in the software (in my case a
HtmlLookPolicy class specially brewn for 444.NET - the above site is not
Seaside based, but I generate HTML with a WAHtmlGenerator class that,
among others, relies on a policy for code generation). It sits in the
same code repository, if the designer wants an update it just enters as
a change request in the regular workflow, and there are no mistakes to
be made. 

Enhydra/ZPT style templating looks promising. However, I think I will
not like it for exactly the reason that we abandoned SSP's - it's a
different, incompatible, development environment with different
workflows and no integration w.r.t. code management (all my Smalltalk
code sits in a StORE PostgreSQL database - I cannot synchronize
templates on disk with that database, so I'm forced to introduce another
repository, CVS, just for the templates). Of course, it is all solvable,
but I think it will require an inordinate amount of tooling for
negligible benefits. 

With a web sites design broken down in elements in a HTML generation
policy, web development can proceed as fast as the programmers can go -
e.g. when I need an extra tab, I just add a tabgroup; no need to go back
to the graphics guy for another template; when I add an editable
attribute to the 444.NET signup screen, it's immediately there; no need
to go back to the graphics guy for an update of the templates; etcetera.

No, I like Seaside a lot. That's why I'm about to stop writing here and
start a port to VW :-)
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