[Seaside] Re: Starting out

[Ramon Leon]

> to make it through the tutorials. But when you go to do 
> something real, behold you discover that some of the most basic components
such 
> > displaying a datagrid from rows in a table are missing.  

This is not a basic component of a web framework, persistence and tables
have nothing to do with web frameworks.  If you want a datagrid, Seaside has
a basic table report, see
http://www.shaffer-consulting.com/david/Seaside/WATableReport/index.html

> > problem. You discover that some people are decidely against putting 
> > anything like that in the core because of their purist inclinations.

No, it's because the core framework only has a few developers and they
should spend their time on things other than GUI widgets, like the next
version of Seaside and performance and scalability.  Widgets belong in add
on packages, not the core, Seaside is the core.

> > Others are simply say to go learn one of the javascript libraries
> > and do it that way. This is also a dilema as you don't know 
> which one
> > would be good and this stuff isn't all that understandable to you.

Ask questions, personally I'd recommend Prototype and Scriptaculous because
they are already well integrated with Seaside via add on packages that make
using them trivial.

> My Impression of the responses so far.
> 
> Someone might work on these issues some day.  
> We have either no interest or they are not important enough
> to address by the people who actually do the programming
> of the seaside system.

No, it's just that the community is very small and people work on the things
they themselves need the most.

> We don't care if the system is useful to normal business
> programmer types, we only care that it is stable.

If by normal business programmer type you mean someone who doesn't know HTML
and CSS, then you're probably not far off.  It is very useful to normal web
programmer types, but that is after all the target audience.

> Yes, you do have to be a rocket scientist to work on seaside!

No, you don't, but you do have to be patient and ask lots of questions
because there isn't much documentation, not in comparison to other
communities like Rails for example.

> Please start your education immediately and come back
> when you are ready.
> 
> PS: On hand holding issue.  I have never submitted a programming
> issue to Oracle yet.  I do have to read their documentation 
> occasionally.

Well, you're going to have to ask questions and read the community blogs,
and even the source code and class comments to really get a grip on Seaside.
This isn't your main stream web framework with 100 how-to books, it's
bleeding edge stuff, you have to expect it'll take a little more effort to
get going.

Ramon Leon
http://onsmalltalk.com