[Seaside] Some questions about Seaside architecture

[Lukas Renggli]

>  * Do You think it is possible to enforce proper back-button support rules
>     in say 10-developers 2-years project?

Wow, with that amount of time using the existing Seaside framework you
could get a lot of web-applications into production:

* write a content-managment-system including a full-fledged meta-model
about 20 times.

* write a business-card print-shop creating professional looking and
ready-to-print PDFs about 200 times.

* write a complex web-shop automatically building PDFs for billing and
shipment about 400 times.

* write SqueakSource an open-source SourceForge clone to manage Squeak
code about 500 times.

>  * Wouldn't mistakes with back-button support be dangerous for application
> security?

Seaside provides the possibility disallow/restrict the use of the
back-button within certains parts of the flow.

self isolate: [ self call: a; call: b ].

>  * My personal opinion is that on a larger project it makes sense to forbid
>     using back-button, because it is infeasible to ensure that everyone uses
>     this functionality correctly, and potentially this creates security
> holes.

As long as there is a back-button people will use it and complain that
it doesn't work, even if you told them that it does not work.

> > >     * Can one backtrack mutable variables within the closures that
> > >       are not referenced from components?
> >
> > The standard approach is to use a "StateHolder" object - a
> > backtracked box - for mutable variables.
>
>  OK, although it seems rather easy to forget  to use it from time-to-time.

No, it rarely happens to me. As it was already mentioned several
times, it is rather seldom to back-track an object, and most of the
time this draws my attention already before starting to write
source-code.

Cheers,
Lukas

--
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch