[Seaside] MVP on Seaside

[Avi Bryant]

On Aug 27, 2004, at 7:56 PM, Sebastian Sastre wrote:

> Hi all,
>  
>     do you ever think about making an MVP framework on top of seaside?
>  
>     I mean, there is a presenter, obviously there are model (your 
> objects), the only thing is missing here is something that decouples 
> the view from the application-model.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about how this might work and 
building small experiments, but I've never come up with anything I'm 
even remotely satisfied with.  I think the basic problem is that web 
UIs are much less standardized than desktop UIs are.  On any given 
desktop platform, there's a fairly small number of widgets that get 
combined in predictable ways to build most applications, and so apart 
from the occasional custom view (one or two per app), all of the view 
classes can be provided by the framework and the application developer 
only has to worry about the model and maybe the controllers/presenters. 
  On the web, there's a culture and aesthetic of building a unique look 
for each application, and so nearly every view class is going to be 
specific to an application.  Having a strict controller/view separation 
here just seems to increase complexity and double the number of classes 
you have to manage.

Having said this, I'd love to be proven wrong by someone coming up with 
a great MVP-style design for Seaside.  CSS is a potential savior here, 
in that it allows a smaller number of view primitives to cover a much 
wider range of looks than would have previously been possible. But it's 
still a hard problem; much harder, I think, in the web context than on 
the desktop.

Avi