[Seaside] Vision for Squeak/Smalltalk web development

Jimmie Houchin j.squeak at cyberhaus.us
Fri Jul 13 19:41:22 UTC 2007


Matthew Fulmer wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 11:24:02AM -0500, Jimmie Houchin wrote:
>> 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. :)
> 
> I really don't think Seaside is the right tool for distributed
> applications; it is quite fundamentally a server-oriented
> architecture. You may find this interesting, however:
> 
> http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tinLizzie_TR-2007-001.pdf

Well, maybe I didn't express that accurately enough. I don't mean 
distributed as in many-to-many, but rather simply I am doing Desktopish 
type stuff from a server based app. I think a full Squeak stack can do 
better than Google Office or the current supply of server-based 
Ajaxified apps.

I think we can do those to if we really wanted to, but.

What if offered a Squeak alternative to Google Gears?
http://gears.google.com/

Google Gears is providing an opportunity to do a desktop type app with 
client-side Javascript and SQLite. We can do it better and easier, I think.

I may not have expressed myself well in avoiding using "Web" in 
describing the ideas. Basically I didn't wish to include "Web" because I 
think we can do better than what the "Web" means to most people. And if 
you go from Squeak server (Seaside) to Squeak-plugin/Squeak-client then, 
is it really "Web", or simply something richer being served over http, 
or somesuch protocol?

Most people are seemingly attempting to bridge the problem with 
server-side-technology-of-choice (Rails or such) and Ajax/Flash. In 
which case you have to master multiple technologies, languages, and such.

Question is, is this anything the community wants? How do we motivate 
ourselves to get there? Can we as a community achieve such? Is the 
community to small? Lack time? Do we need more people? If it is 
something we want, how do we overcome the obstacles?

It seems to me that if we want a end-to-end Squeak/Smalltalk stack, that 
as we solidify, polish and document each piece of the stack, allowing 
people to use that portion of the stack easier and better, that we will 
attract others. And hopefully we will gain sufficient people to complete 
the stack with quality code, deployable solutions and good documentation.

Well, I don't if I've cleared anything up or not. Or if I muddied the 
waters further. We'll see. :)

Any way, I haven't read the article about TinLizzie yet. But I have it 
downloaded, printed and in my to read stack. Soon!

Thanks.

Jimmie


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