[Seaside] Newbie questions about Squeak and Seaside

[Ramon Leon]

> 2. Do you always just edit one method at a time? Isn't that 
> annoying to have to click around so much? Do you always edit 
> new stuff by working on one method at a time in the debugger/browser?

No, it's not annoying, it's awesome, and there are alternate browsers that
allow other styles of development.  An IDE that understands the structure of
the code beats the hell out of a text editor that doesn't.  New stuff is
often written with a browser and a workspace, you try stuff out in a
workspace, hack till it works, then pop it into your model in the browser.
Smalltalkers use a workspace like everyone else uses a REPL.

> 3. I was playing with the counter example in Seaside and it 
> appears that continuation expiration is 600 seconds by 
> default. Is the only way to have user sessions last longer to 
> simply increase the expiration time? How do you do this for a 
> real-world application?

Umm, seems you answered your own question.

> 4. Do you people ever find forcing everything to be 
> object-oriented to be restrictive? I think sometimes it would 
> be as annoying as not having any OO functionality in the 
> language at all. I also think having tons of 7-line methods 
> is weird and unwieldy.

Objects rock, objects all the way down rock even harder.  Smalltalkers
consider tons of 7 line methods well factored well written code, as do most
Lisper's by the way.  The browsers are designed the way they are to
encourage such factoring.  If you want to feel comfortable and be
productive, you have to drink the OO kool-aid.  If you work in Lisp, you
better learn to love functions, in Smalltalk, objects, you will be punished
by the environment for not doing so.

> 5. Is Squeak good for building things where functional 
> languages do pretty well? Things like compilers and interpreters.

Squeak's compiler is written in Squeak, it's all there for the reading.

> I think the debugging and browsing tools are totally amazing 
> (they blow away everything else I've used, including SLIME for Common

Now you're catching on.

> Lisp/Emacs) but the actual editing itself sucks: I miss my 
> Emacs keyboard shortcuts terribly . The reason I'm learning 

So load the Emac's key binding package off squeakmap.

> Squeak is because of Seaside, not the goofy "it's for 
> children"/games/multimedia/mouse gunk.
> 
> Warren

Welcome from a fellow Seasider!