[Seaside] newbie questions

Philippe Marschall philippe.marschall at gmail.com
Mon Dec 17 09:13:27 UTC 2007


2007/12/17, Avi Bryant <avi at dabbledb.com>:
> On 12/17/07, Micheal Cooper <cooper.me at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Michael,
>
> > All of my work must be bilingual Japanese and English, and while I know that
> > Oshima-san has created a multilingual Squeak, I am hesitant to invest time
> > in a framework that relies on  a programming language the i18n of which is
> > tacked on. I had enough of that with PHP.
> >
> > Is anyone using Seaside with multibyte characters?
>
> As a data point, and not because I necessarily suggest doing the same:
> we do support multibyte data in Dabble DB, but not using the Squeak
> 3.8 multibyte support.  We use UTF8 for requests and responses, but
> internally we use a normal String (with one byte characters), and for
> the most part treat text as opaque binary data.  In cases where it
> cannot be opaque (for example, when truncating to a certain number of
> charaters), we use some minimal UTF8-aware operations like #nextUTF8
> on ReadStream.
>
> All in all, this has worked surprisingly well, but I can imagine that
> for heavy text processing it would be woefully inadequate.
>
> > 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.
>
> We have a PDF generation system that is external to Seaside/Squeak -
> it takes HTML input and produces very nice PDF output, with settings
> for paper size, page break policies, etc.  We're toying with the idea
> of licensing this to other developers who need a similar capability,
> possibly as a hosted service.
>
> Alternatively, I know NetStyle got some good results out of the
> pure-Smalltalk SPDF library.

Speaking from first hand experience, SPDF is über-bitchy. Choose it
only if you're masochistic. Think table layout with old Seaside
renderer and absolute positioning and you get an idea.

Cheers
Philippe

> One path I've been down and regretted is generating XSL/FO and
> processing that into PDF.
>
> > 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?
>
> Not really.  Unlike Django or Rails, Seaside is persistence-agnostic.
> Many people write Seaside apps backed by relational DBs; probably the
> most common framework used for this is GLORP.  ROE another option -
> something I wrote a while ago but have never used in anger.
>
> And for the record, it's not that I don't like relational DBs.  I do
> very much dislike O/R mapping.
>
> > 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.
>
> That's a shame - I don't think that particularly has anything to do
> with portability, but it certainly sounds like we can improve our
> initial experience.
>
> I see that Lukas has pointed you to the one-click distribution,
> hopefully you'll have better luck with that.
>
> As for error messages: check for a SqueakDebug.log file in the same
> directory as your image file.  This is a good thing to email.
>
> Avi
> _______________________________________________
> seaside mailing list
> seaside at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside
>


More information about the seaside mailing list