[Seaside] OSCON report

[Ramon Leon]

> - The browser
> - The workspace
> - Saving, loading, and merging in Monticello
> - The basics of Seaside (a revamped "Walk on the Seaside" tutorial  
> would be fine)
> 
> Avi

You're absolutely correct, but I think you need to cover a little more 
ground on Smalltalk...

  - A small lesson in image style development and maintenance, this is a 
HUGE change for them and needs to be addressed. For a newbie the image 
is far to easy to crash and recovering changes from the change log isn't 
something that just jumps out at you, I lost quite a bit of code before 
discovering the change log.

  - Publishing a Seaside app using Apache/Stunnel.  They'll freak when 
they find out Squeak can't do SSL natively, best to acknowledge that 
early and get them thinking of Seaside as sort of a dynamic page 
generation framework that you use in conjunction with Apache/Stunnel. 
If they're coming from a windows background where "lot's of little tools 
that work well together" is not how things are normally done, they're 
going to expect Squeak to do everything, I did.

If you do a custom image, there's a few packages that I think a web 
developer would appreciate pre-installed beyond Seaside/Scriptaculous

  - KeyBinder
  - ODBC
  - PieChart
  - PlotMorph
  - Shout
  - eCompletion
  - SoapCoreClient
  - Yaxo

With maybe a few pre-bound hot keys to get the environment going for 
them, say for launching Monticello, or maybe opening a 
browser/transcript/workspace and sizing them appropriately giving it a 
more traditional IDE feel.  Make them feel more comfortable until they 
get a deeper grasp on how all this stuff really works.  Maybe even Cee's 
Refractoring Browser with most of the Smalltalk categories hidden and 
only Seaside categories visible initially, might make it seem less 
daunting.

I think there is a mainstream audience for Seaside as well, I've been 
showing it off at work lately and interest seems high, people are sick 
of traditional style web development, most just don't know better things 
exist.  It'd be nice if Smalltalk made a resurgence by showing them the 
way.  I know I'm hooked, this is the language for me, nothing else even 
comes close.