[Seaside] Rails and Seaside

[Wilkes Joiner]

Excellent write up on how web app development should be.

On 1/6/06, Cees De Groot <cdegroot at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wow, what a thread.
>
> On the blog: the guy is right, of course. He notes that Seaside has a
> higher S/N ratio but he also notes that most programmers out there are
> a bit rusty, inflexible, and unlikely to make easy shifts.
>
> That's the very reason I haven't learned Lisp yet :-).
>
> On CSS: I agree 100% with Avi. It's a pity that I'm still developing
> my latest in CSS, but it's a typical example (url's in a couple of
> weeks when the site is live).
>
> I generate ugly HTML (with VAST WebConnect, there really is no choice
> there ;-)), with at best validation javascript. The site is accessed
> through a CGI forwarder. Which means that I hand the designers:
> - the contents of /cgi-bin
> - the url in /cgi-bin that starts the app
> - a promise to include /style/global.css in every page
> - a promise to  include /style/<pagename>.css in every page
> - a promise to  include /js/<pagename>.js in every page
> The latter two files are optional, it's a bit ugly but browsers don't
> complain about missing files Of course, a round of 'touch' commands
> could be used as well. In any case, I don't bother with any static
> files, they can set it up and even use whatever webserver they want
> (this particular bunch seems to insist on IIS).
>
> The idea is that my adorned (classes and ids all over the place) HTML
> can be layed out by default by a global css script. It was a first for
> them, but I handed them a sample script based on a static html design
> (created in, err, 2.5 hours - and that's mostly because I'm lousy at
> CSS) and they worked from there, producing two completely differently
> looking sites in a couple of days (the idea is that this site is
> marketed to various demographic segments, each gets its own
> look&feel). If they want to get groovy, they can override stuff on a
> per-page basis by providing a page-specific css file (used to do
> button image replacement - in a wizard-style screen, when the "next"
> button needs to be labeled, say, "order now" in the last screen, for
> example).
>
> And today they found out why I insisted on offering them javascript
> hooks as well, they got the idea to replace some header stuff with
> flash using javascript :-)
>
> The designers have near total freedom (granted, css can be a bit
> harder than old school webdesign, but only a bit), and I can purely
> concentrate on business logic. This really works, and to an extent
> that goes beyond anything that I've ever accomplished or seen with
> templates. That's a very real advantage, both technical and
> business-wise, and should not be ignored.
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