User Experience Report (WAS Re: [Seaside] Nearing 2.3)

[Avi Bryant]

Nevin,

Many thanks for taking the time to write up these comments.

On Thu, 27 Mar 2003, Nevin Pratt wrote:

> 1. Seaside 2.3 seems to be quite stable.

I've just had a report of some problems with interactions with the
debugger in 2.3, so it's definitely not 100% stable yet.  But good to know
that you didn't run into any issues.

> 2. Not surprisingly, some of the API has changed (I suppose in any
> upgrade this is to be expected).  However, due to my own lack of
> understanding of the Seaside internals, it wasn't immediately apparant
> what the equivalent 2.3 functionality was.  Over the last few days, you
> can find a number of my posts to this list that illustrate.

Are there any of these changes on which you're still unclear?

> 3. I find that the simple enhancement of being able to do
>       html bold: 'foo'
>    instead of:
>       html bold: [html text: 'foo']
>    to be extremely useful.  This one enhancement alone makes the switch
> from 2.21 to 2.3 worth it.

Thanks go to Cees for that one.

> 4. The lack of a pretty-printer for the html builder is annoying.  To
> me, this is probably the single biggest downside of moving from 2.21 to 2.3.

I hear you.  It shouldn't be hard to add a pretty printer that's as good
as the one in 2.2 (which is to say, not very - it adds extra space inside
textareas, for example).  Doing it "right" is a harder problem that
probably won't be solved before the 2.3 release.

> But, realizing that there is a DOM tree behind the scenes garners a
> vague suspicion that there ought to be ways to exploit the DOM tree that
> I haven't thought of yet, and that using a DOM tree is potentially a
> huge win.

I agree.  This was explicitly done with the attitude of "add the feature
now, figure out how to take advantage of it later".

> 6. Many of the old examples are either completely broken, or partially
> broken.  This will make it harder for new folks to start with 2.3 than
> if they started with 2.21.

Which examples, broken in which ways?

> 7. As I think about how Seaside works, I have a vague suspicion that
> Seaside is not really suitable for high-volume sites.

No argument here.  Seaside maintains a fair amount of state per user
session (I've found 1MB or so is not uncommon, although if you're careful
you can keep it lower than that).  Partly that's because there's been
essentially no work done to optimize it (a smarter implementation of
Continuation, for example, would go a long way).  Party it's just that the
approach is inherently resource hungry.  Either way, you don't wanna be
deploying the next Yahoo using it.

But there are a lot of useful, lucrative problems to solve that don't
require thousands of concurrent sessions per server.

> 8. Most of the bountifulbaby.com site right now is static pages.
>  Seaside produces *no* benefits at all for a purely static web site.

Also agreed.

Thanks again for the comments.
Avi