[Seaside] OSCON report

[Brad Fuller]

Has anyone heard this (sorry if it was posted before)?

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2006/08/07/distributing-the-future.html
"With all the attention that Ruby on Rails has been getting, have we not
been paying enough attention to the Smalltalk Seaside framework? Also,
we'll look back at some OSCON moments.(DTF 08-07-2006: 28 minutes 15
seconds)"


Avi Bryant wrote:
> Since this StOR thread seems to be about reaching an audience we
> haven't had before, it's probably worth mentioning what I've been up
> to for the last week.
>
> I've just returned from the O'Reilly's open source OSCON conference. 
> I gave a talk on Seaside very intentionally angled not towards
> convincing people to jump ship from Python/Perl/Rails etc, but rather
> towards getting them to consider some of the basic technologies - like
> the the Canvas, Component, Callback and Continuation model (hm, never
> noticed all those C's before) - for use in their environment of
> choice.  However, interest was high enough that:
>
> - I gave a 45 minute talk to a packed room (some good photos at
> http://flickr.com/photos/jacobian/)
> - followed by about 30 minutes of Q&A with most people still in the room
> - followed by 3 hours of conversation with a large group at dinner
> about Seaside and Smalltalk
> - followed by a subset of that group tracking me down first thing the
> next morning and making me spend another couple of hours doing a
> Squeak demo
>
> What I found is that a) a huge number of these people have tried
> Squeak before, and that b) they were all very excited by what they saw
> in my (very simple) demo, but none of them had been able to make the
> journey themselves from the one to the other - that is, it was
> impossible for them to just download a Squeak image and, with no prior
> Smalltalk experience, find their way through a Hello World Seaside
> app.  So they decided Squeak wasn't for them.  There's also a huge
> amount of confusion and disinformation about the state of things like
> version control: essentially everyone seems to believe that the image
> is the only way to distribute Smalltalk code, and is understandably
> leery of this.
>
> I sensed enough goodwill, and got enough concrete offers to publish
> articles/books/etc, to think that the opportunity is there to get a
> mainstream audience for Seaside *if* (and this is a fairly large if)
> we want it and have the resources to put into it.  What it would take,
> I think, is a custom Squeak distribution and tutorial/screencast that
> was aimed at a non-Smalltalk audience.  It would need to cover:
>
> - The browser
> - The workspace
> - Saving, loading, and merging in Monticello
> - The basics of Seaside (a revamped "Walk on the Seaside" tutorial
> would be fine)
>
> An ActiveRecord-like simple O/R framework would certainly help too,
> but I think the above is a higher priority.
>
> Incidentally, I was asked by a few people at the conference how big
> the Seaside community was, and I was very pleased to be able to say
> "well, I almost never post to the list anymore, because other people
> are doing all the question answering, discussing, and committing". 
> That's pretty cool, and an important threshold to cross, I think.
>
> Avi
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>


-- 
brad fuller
sonaural: www.sonaural.com
personal: www.bradfuller.com