[Seaside] Newbie questions about Squeak and Seaside

[stephane ducasse]

> 1. I have an idea for a web application that involves a lot of custom
> text processing logic. Is Squeak an acceptable environment for
> implementing a real full-blown application? How is its performance for
> common tasks compared to, say, Python, Ruby, and Common Lisp? Do I
> need to shell out for VisualWorks or something in order to get
> real-world work done?

Other people can reply but I know several companies making money with  
squeak and
been happy :)

> 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?

you can also use a texteditor. Or try some other browser
this is true that what is boring is that we cannot edit a method do  
not accept it, jump to another oe edit and come ack to the first one.  
You can use what romain robbes did as extension of omnibrowser  
because you can do that with his cool changes.


> 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?
>
> 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.

This is fun because I'm teaching the inverse.
A method is a unit of reuse: I can call it and I can extend it.
Look at hook method. If you do not have a hook method and hardcoded  
everything
then you will have to copy and paste in your subclasses sometimes  
just to get a slight modification.
So while at first little methods are annoying to browse in fact  
having small method is a sign of
good quality from a reuse and extension point of view. I hope you get  
it else just ask again.

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

Sure. The JIT technology of java was invented for smalltalk. You get  
one interpreter (or the same)
in any texteditor which allow you to do "do it" :)
>
> I think the debugging and browsing tools are totally amazing (they
> blow away everything else I've used, including SLIME for Common
> Lisp/Emacs) but the actual editing itself sucks: I miss my Emacs
> keyboard shortcuts terribly .

there are packages to extend and cusotmize the system (emacs binding  
amd keybinding)
and again everything is there waiting for your customization :)

> The reason I'm learning Squeak is
> because of Seaside, not the goofy "it's for
> children"/games/multimedia/mouse gunk.

Welcome. This is the right list and for squeak 3.9 we focused on  
making Squeak a good
system to develop software (and of course developing games/kids and  
gunky stuff).
We did not go as far as expected but this is the way to go and help  
is welcomed :)


Stef