[Seaside] Re: Starting out

[Julian Fitzell]

I might as well throw in a few cents... I am glad that so many people
think we are focusing on the right things. And really, we don't have a
choice. Those of us who are "core developers" have spent more time
thinking about and living in the internals of Seaside than most people
will ever want/need to.  It would be madness for us to focus on
widgets and so on and expect the community at large to take on
refining the core. So I think we are spending our time the only place
it makes sense to spend it.

At the same time, I don't believe that we are doing everything that we
"should" or could be doing. I would love the experience of learning
seaside to be easier. There are many aspects to this: documentation,
component libraries (even if only samples, rather than reusable ones),
deployment tools, etc, etc. Getting these done is just a matter of
person-hours and, so far, the community just doesn't seem to have
found them.

But, I feel like that is beginning to change. In my presentation at
ESUG this year I talked about the evolution of Seaside. I argued that
we have gone through a Development/Experimentation phase, have largely
finished a Stabilization phase, and are working on Optimization. There
was a thread months ago on the list about what should be in the next
version of Seaside and all the suggestions were things like the above
(docs, components, deployment, etc). We can argue that those aren't
part of the core but I think the key point is that the core has
reached a relatively stable state and it's time to put some effort
into Adoption (assuming we want more users, that is :) ).

The core team is already trying to promote Adoption by focusing
extensively on portability in 2.9 (and in 2.8). The support of all the
major Smalltalk vendors is a huge win for us and we're seeing quite a
bit of publicity by riding the back side of the Rails wave. But if
we're going to win over all the people who come to our door we DO need
a better getting started package. And Sophie's right that it doesn't
help these people to define "Seaside" as Seaside-core. Seaside-core
should be just that: the core of Seaside; not the entirety.

So, no, component libraries aren't likely to end up in the "core" any
time soon but that doesn't mean they can't be included in a 1-click
download image. And that image is what new users will call "Seaside".

Julian


On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 5:07 AM, Sophie (itsme213) <itsme213 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> The "Seaside-core" vs. various "Seaside-addOn-X" packages distinction is
> important for those who are already familiar with Seaside. And who already
> see clearly the heart of a web-application framework, separate from other
> facilities built on top of it. And who know where to find some such
> facilities or build it themselves to their need.
>
> But, as a matter of positioning (specially for some starting-out folks), we
> might tone down presenting
>    "Seaside == Seaside-core"
> as a given.
>
> My 2 c :)