[Seaside] Seaside subsets

[Jason Johnson]

Well, for my web pages I use Pier.

But one thing I would change (and will if someone else doesn't before I 
get there :) is how CSS rendering works.  I think instead of having a 
#style message that just spits out a string, CSS should have it's own 
renderer.  It more or less has it's own render phase anyway, we may as 
well make it official with a CSSCanvas class or something.  This could 
help with browser version differences and maybe help with some of the 
problems with CSS fighting with Halos (i.e. conflict 
detection/resolution).  I also have other ideas for such a renderer to 
make CSS building more accessible to non-programmers. ;)

Avi Bryant wrote:
> As 2.7 gets closer to beta (right?) and people might be thinking about
> what 2.8 or even 3.0 might look like, I thought it might be
> interesting to share a somewhat surprising experience I've had: Dabble
> DB, which is by far the most complex web application I've ever worked
> on, uses really a rather small subset of Seaside.  For example:
>
> - We never use the old WAHtmlRenderer code.  Ok, no surprise there,
> but in case anyone was wondering, it's all Canvas all the way.
> - We never use decorations, ever.  No new subclasses of WADecoration,
> no #isolate:, no #authenticateWith:during:,etc.  Hasn't come up.
> - We never use any of the standard dialog or widget components.  For
> us, anyway, the Canvas tags turn out to be the right level of detail
> for reuse across apps.  We do plenty of reusing components within the
> app, but a generic YesOrNoDialog or WATree doesn't cut it except when
> prototyping.
> - We do use halos, and I'd like to use them more, but they do badly
> with heavily CSS-styled layouts.  Note that I only use them to see
> page structure and for view source, I don't use the web-based system
> browser (that's what the RFB Server is for).
> - We do use the preferences system pretty heavily, with app-specific
> subclasses of WASystemConfiguration that provide defaults we can
> override from /config.  But we don't use the baroque multiple
> inheritance system.
> - We don't use libraries (CSS or Javascript) at all.  We use
> #updateRoot: and #resourceUrl: heavily to bring in external .css and
> .js files which the designer controls.
> - We use WATask sparingly.  In fact, pretty much the only use is for
> collecting payment info, which is of course the classic example I
> always give.
> - We certainly do use #call: and #answer:, but much less than you
> might expect given how much talk there is about continuations.  And
> the #call: stack rarely gets more than one component deep.  Instead,
> we're much more likely to conditionally render a child component, or
> to have a "currentChild" state variable which is constantly modified
> during navigation.
> - Except for a handful of those "currentChild" state variables, we
> don't use WAStateHolder or #registerObjectForBacktracking: at all.
> Well, that's not strictly true: we use it once, with a single
> session-global NavigationContext object that holds all the
> backtrackable state as instance variables.  The entire component tree
> at any given time can almost always be determined by examining the
> NavigationContext.
> - We do use Scriptaculous, but mostly only the Ajax bits rather than
> the effects.
>
> So, I'm curious how typical my experience is.  If it's shared by most
> of you, we may want to do some major housecleaning...
>
> Avi
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