[Seaside] Rails and Seaside

[Jason Rogers]

In hist post at
http://www.braithwaite-lee.com/weblog/2006/01/finding-signal-to-noise-ratio-in-never.html,
Reg Braithwaite has this to say about why Rails is chosen over
Seaside.  I am curious to hear others thoughts...

Personally, I would choose Seaside over Rails any day of the week, and
twice on Sunday.  How do the other users of Seaside feel?  To me the
decision about choosing Seaside over Rails is not *just* about the
framework itself, it's also about the environment in which I am
building my application.  If Ruby came anywhere near Smalltalk's
environment, I might be more willing to lean toward Ruby.

[quote]
Speaking of Rails, I'm going to conclude with my take on one reason
why Rails is taking off and Seaside is not. Rails allows programmers
to express the idioms they already know (relational databases,
web-backed MVC, stateless event handling plus a global session store)
in fewer bits.

Seaside provides a whole new idiom, continuations, that IMO is more
powerful. I think you end up with an even higher signal-to-noise ratio
with a Seaside app than with a Rails app. Why? Because continuations
afford you a much higher degree of controller reuse.

Now, here's the catch: if you try to imagine your current application
running on both Rails and on Seaside, you probably won't see much
difference between the two (although they'll both be an order of
magnitude better than ASP.NET). They will look the same because you
designed your application with idioms that both Rails and Seaside
support.

To get a big win, you'd have to rethink your application's flow and
logic. You'd have to "think in Seaside." And you're not going to do
that. So you pick Rails, like so many others have picked it, because
it looks just like your ASP app, only all the noise has gone away.
It's all signal, baby.
[/quote]

--
Jason Rogers

"I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I,
but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in
the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved
me, and gave himself for me."
    Galatians 2:20