[Seaside] newbie questions

[Lukas Renggli]

> Is anyone using Seaside with multibyte characters?

It is should work, but I don't know if anybody actually uses multibyte
characters. For example an unprepared test on my blog:

http://www.lukas-renggli.ch/blog/studenckifestwal

> I also wonder about document generation. Is there  a PDF or OpenOffice.org
> document generator that can be used with Seaside apps? My app is a college
> administration and info management system, and I have to dynamically produce
> printable documents in both English and Japanese. In fact, everything in the
> system has to switch between J and E.

There are some packages that do that kind of things.

> Relational databases: I have a database with lots of data in it, and I need
> to accommodate that relational DB. Avi has said in several interviews that
> he doesn't like relational db's, so does that mean that Seaside doesn't work
> well with them? I can't imagine that would be the case, since he wrote
> DabbleDB. With Django, relational db's are the main thing, and you can
> either define everything in Python and generate the DB or work backward from
> an SQL data definition file and generate the Django webapp.

Seaside is a web application framework, and not a persistency mapper.
It is up to you what kind of persistency mechanism you are going to
use. Smalltalk programmers usually prefer object-databases of some
kind, but I have also worked on projects where relational databases
were used. There are frameworks like ROE and GLORP that can do some
automatic object mapping for you.

> Lastly, I wonder why I couldn't get Seaside to work this morning on my Tiger
> OS 10.4 machine. I downloaded the Mac dev package by Cassou and followed the
> directions, but when I try to open Seaside, I get a "a primitive has failed"
> error. I get the same when I try to open the regular Squeak 3.9 image and
> then try to install Seaside through SqueakMap or Universe when it tries
> "Installing DynamicBindings version 2.7" after I click "Install Selections".
> I can't even figure out how to copy and paste the error messages into this
> email.

Take the One-Click experience from www.seaside.st (the download link
on the front-page) or another image available from that web-site. They
all come with Seaside pre-installed and work out of the box.

Cheers,
Lukas

-- 
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch