[Seaside] Starting out
Tony Giaccone
tony at giaccone.org
Thu Dec 18 00:56:44 UTC 2008
Michael,
I read your posting and I had to laugh a little. I work full time
during the day building web based applications in Java with a
relational database supporting the storage and delivery of data. I
work in about as corporate and conservative an environment that you
could imagine. Security is key, reducing risk is key, standards are key.
Our management believes that using standard industry accepted
technology keeps them safe, and secure and minimizes expenses.
We use JBOSS as our application server. "Why?" you ask. Because we
can get a support contract from Red Hat for it. Never mind what we do
would more than adequately be supported by Tomcat, but we take the
safe route with corporate support.
We're probably a bit extreme, but not as bad as some of the other
places, I've worked.
The possibility of bringing in Seaside and Smalltalk in our
environment, is about zero. Not for any of the reasons you mention.
Professionally I think what seaside brings to the table could easily
be a huge advantage in many of our smaller projects. Quick rapid
prototyping of a sophisticated application in with a development
environment that, mostly, works with you not against you (ask me
about my frustrations with eclipse and maven sometime).
Where's the support contract? Where's the industry acceptance? Where
can I hire 5 experienced Seaside developers in the next week. How do
I scale a Seaside application? How do I manage multiple instances of
Seaside integrated with BigIP? Where are the articles in Information
Week about successful deployments with Seaside? All of those are
barriers to entry for Seaside in Corporate America.
Seaside does not stand in your way of getting work done. It may not
give you all the most sophisticated widgets and doo dahs' to ease your
development tasks, but I am extremely certain that it will not get in
the way of doing the work you need to do, and that once you've built
up a library of your own gadgets, you'd be able to go from
requirements to finished web sites very quickly.
But I think the biggest issue is that currently you have to be
motivated, good at what you do, and a step above the average
programmer in CA to see the advantages of Seaside, and be successful
with it. Seaside at this point is not visible enough to pass the
Corporate America Risk test. (Are my peers using it? Have I read
enough about it? Am I risking my career by choosing it?).
The current situation with WebDevelopment is a Big Ball of Mud.
There's a thousand different possible solutions, all in varying states
of sophistication. In order to do real sophisticated web development
you need to know a bunch of different technologies, HTML, JavaScript,
XML, SOAP, CSS, AJAX, are probably the basics, but then you can go way
beyond that as well. For example start looking at the differences in
the implementation of the HTTP and CSS specs by each browser, and how
IE differens from Firefox. (oy vey).
I can almost certainly guarantee that if you're building web pages
with Oracle Forms, then Seaside is not in the near future, if ever,
going to be a suitable replacement for what you have. in the same way
that you'll not likely replaces Visual Basic programs with XWindows/C+
+ programs. Oracle Forms glosses over many of the grungy details,
which you don't want to know about and probably don't care to know
about.
Enjoy Seaside and understand that it has strengths and weaknesses. If
you want to really understand the HTTP Protocol, the details of how
data moves back and forth between your web browser and your
application, you can discover that with Seaside. If you want to just
build something cool and avoid most of that you can do that too with
Seaside, but you won't get the hand holding that Orcacle can provide
because they have 1000's of your dollars in licensing fees and product
purchases.
Now, having said all that, I know there are companies that support
seaside, I know that there are people using seaside to develop
sophisticated applications used by the general public. I know that
some folks are making a living doing seaside development work. It's
all possible, but you have to work in a very open environment and not
the typical corporate american IT world to live life on that edge.
Tony Giaccone
On Dec 17, 2008, at 2:14 PM, Michael Atkisson wrote:
> Imagine you are a business programmer, although you have heard of this
> exciting new environment called Seaside.
>
> You would like to create forms that operate like the ones you do at
> work
> such as in Oracle Forms. On further investigation, perhaps you manage
> 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. Something
> that
> you probablydo on at least 50% of your forms in Oracle
>
> Next you read the mailing list to see if anyone has a solution to the
> problem. You discover that some people are decidely against putting
> anything like that in the core because of their purist inclinations.
> 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.
>
> You don't know much about html, javascript, css, ajax, etc. and you
> probably don't want to spend a year figuring it all out.
> All you want to do is solve problems like the ones you have at work in
> as straightforward a way as possible.
>
> How much further do you think that person is likely to go?
>
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