[Seaside] Rails and Seaside

[Jeremy Shute]

I think it's less about Seaside vs. Rails and more about Squeak vs. Ruby. 
The paradigm shift from Python/Perl is greater in Squeak.  Verbose message
sends vs. dot-notation and function arity, lack of control structures,
evaluation order control via blocks instead of special rules.  Images and
changesets?  Where the hell are my files?

The other trouble for me was one of incentive.  At first glance Squeak
looked like a toy.  In fact, it comes with something called "Etoys" and
has "teacher packs" and all that educational, childish mumbo-jumbo. 
Squeak is often mentioned in the same breath as "Logo" and "turtle
graphics".  Squeak reminds me of a Mazda Miata: killer sports car, huge
image problem.

What I had to do was simple:

* Eliminate the useless eyeball widget thing.
* Eliminate everything else on the screen, including the trashcan.
* Turn the background black instead of some silly shade of purple.
* Save the image over the previous one.

There, now I have a barren wasteland.  It's "Hackers and Painters": when a
painter picks up a canvas, typically it's a blank one.  For me, when I'm
learning how to use something, I need LESS distractions, not more.

Jeremy



> 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
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