[Seaside] Feedback from an experienced Java-C# Guy but absolute Smalltalk/Seaside/Squeak Newbie

elni elni at freenet.de
Wed Jul 18 06:14:25 UTC 2007


Hi there.

I just discovered Seaside after originally looking for .NET Frameworks that
make our development live easier. So, in fact it was an inaccurate Google
search term that brought me here. I also got stuck with seaside because I
also was looking into E-Toys Squeak to teach one of my children some basic
programming. Anyway I thought, while all of these instant "What is all of
this"-questions are still up in my head, I thought I´d provide some feedback
on how you could improve your product to attract more dev folks.

First, a new user is unaware that there are different flavors of Smalltalk
and that seaside needs to be ported from one flavor to the other. A little
sentence that says something like "seaside is based on Smalltalk, a proven
and robust language that is implemented by different vendors... to get
seaside running you only need THIS image that has everything you need to get
started".

Of course the Squeak-GUI - and how it interfaces with the seaside
web-frontend needs more explanation. I discovered that code errors in the
web frontend, trigger some debug (or whatever it is) process in the Squeak
GUI and the browser is waiting for some "proceed" action triggered from the
GUI.

The biggest question mark is Database connectivity. I use SubSonic (.NET) or
ActiveRecord for my projects and I really like the approach. I read some
threads about a PostgresMapper and Object Databases but it would be great to
see day-to-day database samples that put all of that into context. There
might be n-ways to do it but there should be an easy standard way of
connecting to the most common databases and data that is already out there.
No SQL please.

Ah, and one thing... the counter example is great... but I hit the exact
same sample in nearly all presentations about seaside. It would be great to
have some more variety.

Ok, so thanks for your time. I hope you don´t get me wrong, as it is not my
intention to degrade Seaside. Just some ideas on how to improve. The
framework itself looks very capable!

Thanks,
Elmar




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