[Seaside] Seaside Thoughts & Questions

[Daniel Drasin]

Subject:  Re: Seaside - love it!
   Date:  Sat, 26 Apr 2003 14:09:31 -0700 (PDT)
   From: Avi Bryant <avi at beta4.com>
     To: Daniel Drasin <dan at drasin.org>
    CC: julian at beta4.com

On Sat, 26 Apr 2003, Daniel Drasin wrote:

> Avi & Julian,
>
> Been using seaside for a month or so and love it - wanted to let you
> know.  (Writing a game engine and wanted to quickly put a web front end
> on it.  It was quick and easy - a very nice change from request/response
> hell).

Great to hear.  What kind of a game?

> At any rate, having mulled it over i had a couple of thoughts/questions and
thought you guys might know that answers.

> - anyone done any work on porting seaside (or something like it) to
> java?

There would be a number of obstacles.  The biggest is that there is no
way
to do continuations in Java, so the back button simply wouldn't work,
and
even without the back button you'd have to maintain one thread/session -
which is pretty heavy weight in the Java world.  The whole HtmlRenderer
thing would be a lot uglier in Java as well - anonymous inner classes
are
not a good substitute for blocks.

More feasible would be implementing something on top of a JVM-based
interpreter of some more reasonable language, like the SISC scheme
interpreter.  That would still be a lot of work, though.  What would be
the advantages from your point of view?

> - anyone thought about decoupling the application response from the UI
> building?  (e.g. adding an extra layer of indirection [command pattern]
> to encapsulate all UI interactions - see example below.).  This would
> allow users to swap out different front ends (HTML, VB, Java, etc.).
> This becomes really powerfull now that the "request/response" paradigm
> is converted into the standard control flow of client-server
> applications - now you can front end a single set of application logic
> (not just business logic) with all the different client interfaces types
> (without needed extra logic on the client).

I've certainly thought about this - whether or not seamlessly swapping
UIs
out is feasible, it definitely seems like Seaside's approach could be
usefully applied to a thin client paradigm.  But thin client systems do
not have a very good success rate right now - web apps, for all their
clunkiness, have some huge advantages.  So while the possibilities
interest me, I'd have to have a pretty compelling reason (like a request
from a client) to do much work in that direction.

I don't understand the benefit in your example below, however, of
separating out the "bindings".  Method names are already a level of
indirection - why refer to 'PlusButton' rather than #increment?

>  -anyone done any work to implement a server monitor for seaside (keeps
> track of users, their requests, etc. and presents them to through an
> admin UI)?  I couldn't find any out there so i wrote a quick and dirty
> one, but would love something better.

None that I've seen (if you want to send your work in I'd love to take a
look).  This is definitely something we'll want to build in earnest,
eventually...

> At any rate, this stuff is really unique and first rate.  I hope it really
catches on!

Thanks for the encouragement!

Cheers,
Avi
-- 
	Daniel Drasin				
	dan at drasin.org				8612 Long Meadow Ct.
	(410)-461-6168				Columbia, MD, 21045