[Seaside] Vision for Squeak/Smalltalk web development

[Jimmie Houchin]

What I think would be wonderful for the community to work towards 
overtime and what I think would also help Seaside in garnering a 
potentially larger share of distributed applications. Would be a nice, 
documented, deployable, end-to-end Squeak stack for distributed 
applications.
(Yes no "Web" in that expression. :)

It would be nice if on the server side we have Squeak/Smalltalk/Seaside 
and on the client a nice, easily installable, well tested, Squeak 
browser plugin for delivering rich apps on the client side. No need for 
flash, flex, silverlight, etc. A completely open source end-to-end 
solution for rich distributed applications.

Have good documentation for all the standard deployment solutions.

All Squeak/Smalltalk stack.

Seaside - Squeak-plugin

Seaside
Persistence options
   in-image
   and if desired or necessary -
     Magma
     Glorp-Gemstone, etc.
Squeak-plugin
   Degrading to Ajax
   Degrading to Non-Ajax

Nobody offers a complete stack like that in the open source world. You 
could have the possibility of rich distributed apps and all in Squeak. 
You can't do that in Python, Ruby, Perl, etc.  (Okay maybe Java, but 
yuck. I don't like sites which use Java in the client. And thats my 
opinion as a consumer, not developer.)

Most of the tools are already there. We just need to clean up the stack, 
polish it, document it better.

Now, I don't really know much about the Squeak-plugin. And I don't know 
how ready for primetime it is and if it is ready yet to compete with 
Flash/Flex. But it would be nice for that day to come. I also don't know 
what the implications would be to using the plugin for a Seaside 
application.

It would be absolutely fantastic if one day we can deploy and the web 
browser (if being used to access the site) would simply open up the app 
in an independent squeak process and not in an in-browser-plugin. That 
way the browser won't take down the Squeak app if it decides to crash.

Maybe this could be something to think about. Maybe Seaside 3.0 :)

What do we want included in a Squeak/Smalltalk/Seaside stack?

Can we develop a road map to get there?

I really believe that if done right, that we can go places the other 
guys can't easily go. We can build a stack that they can't easily build. 
A stack that they don't have a vision for and no means to implement.

This is an exploitable situation. And can be promoted totally in a 
positive manner without mentioning or demeaning any other technology in 
its promotion.

We can play just as nice and better than most with any current and 
future browser, html, http, technologies. And if we can have a quality 
Squeak on the client, either via plugin, Sophie, ???. And an image 
appropriately designed, shrunk, ??? for client-side deployment. Then our 
deployment options are much greater than most others.

I just wanted to toss this ball out there and see how it goes.

Thanks.

Jimmie