[Seaside] Re: thoughts on Seaside 3.0

Diogenes Moreira diogenes.moreira at gmail.com
Mon Jul 14 19:01:53 UTC 2008


Dear folks, I worked in web application since cgi's time, and I'm fully
agree with Esteban.
Ofcourse, convert a design made in Photo Shop to seaside(like the designer
o customers wish,) is a lot of work, but al last is the better way to do and
mantenin the thinks.
Bad design (in programing terms) may be a disaters for the applications.

I repeat.

*please* stay away of templates for seaside.

PD: may be in a plug-in but not in the core of seaside.



On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 3:33 PM, Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Well, I want to say something on this: I have worked by eight years on
> web-applications, and one of the main reasons I love seaside is because of
> his lack of templates, and I have many reasons:
>
> 1) The whole thing about "UI designers can take care about the
> ui-specific-program details, but programmers can't take care about the UI
> stuff is a bunch of crap: most of the ui-designers can't program, and guess
> what? web-applications need programming in the UI side.
> 2) When you use a templating system, UI-designers use cut&paste technics
> for produce his pages, and of course, this ends with lots of bad-designed
> (in programing terms) pages and presentation stuff who nobody can or want to
> mantain.
> 3) well designed programs works as Avi described before me: a designer just
> need to change CSS most of the time, and sometimes a little change in
> HTML... this path requires much less effort that the other (who is enforced
> by html templates): designer changes templates and programmers adapt his
> sources to the changes.
> 4) templates work against code reusability
>
>
> So, *please* stay away of templates for seaside.
>
> Thanks,
> Esteban
>
> On 2008-07-14 14:10:26 -0300, Jared Hirsch <jaredhirsch at yahoo.com> said:
>
>  I've been lurking in the squeak/seaside lists for a while, and feel I
>> should add to the discussion of new features for a possible seaside 3.0.
>>
>> The major obstacle that I see to further adoption and growth of seaside is
>> widespread community ignorance of the design side of web development. This
>> has to do with templates, but it runs much, much deeper.
>>
>> The html templates issue has two sides. From a design standpoint, burying
>> html inside smalltalk leads to opposite but equal maintainability problems
>> and inelegant html code.
>>  The reality of the web is that good graphic designers create XHTML by
>> hand, and giving good designers control only of the CSS (like in seaside
>> 2.8) isn't nearly enough. I think everyone should spend an afternoon reading
>> articles on 'a list apart' to start to understand that there are intelligent
>> people who devote lots of time to hand-coding "beautiful html." And take a
>> look at the design openings on 'authentic jobs' to see that there are web
>> design companies that pay lots of money for this specific skill.
>>  These people aren't stupid, just different; after all, if one can make a
>> beautiful shoe, why not, in principle, beautiful html? The significance of
>> the word "beautiful" is that we've got a different but legitimate
>> alternative aesthetic perspective, a different community; and Seaside, in
>> its current form, is wholly incompatible with this design-oriented
>> community.
>>
>> Consider that RoR was written by a guy who works with graphic designers
>> all day; he was aware of this fundamental web dichotomy. I think that most
>> smalltalkers come from a very different background (traditional non-web
>> programming), with a very different set of assumptions. I'm not attacking or
>> judging these differences, only pointing out that critically analyzing them
>> is crucial if seaside is going to be useful in commercial web development.
>> Right now, it's not.
>>
>> I also want to mention that one of the best things about the web is that
>> it's a true crossover field, which computer science ceased to be a
>> generation ago: nobody gets a 'web sciences' degree (yet). Instead, there
>> are web designers with backgrounds in print design, print/TV advertising,
>> copywriting, or graphic design, and they're all learning to work with
>> programmers of all stripes who have moved to web programming. It's an
>> exciting and still young (fast evolving) field.
>>  And just as the deeper aspects of design are only just starting to appear
>> on the web--typography on the web is in absolute primitive infancy, while in
>> print it's been established for hundreds of years; grid-based design is
>> finally coming into the open as well--so the deeper aspects of programming
>> (patterns/reusability, XP/agile, true OOP) are in their web-infancy too.
>>  The smalltalk community is one of those deep mines of knowledge that
>> could enrich web culture with the mature perspective that decades of
>> experience bring--but it's going to take some flexibility from the
>> smalltalkers. To be honest, I don't see that flexibility in the community,
>> and I think it's the make-or-break question: if the good old way of
>> programming isn't 100% appropriate on the web, is there interest in
>> exploring the new thing? Or is the interest in trying to force the new thing
>> to fit the old way? Right now, I think Seaside is much closer to the latter.
>>
>> I sincerely hope that someone can enlighten me as to how seaside is, or is
>> planning to become, accommodating for designers who hand-code XHTML, and the
>> web design agencies that employ them. This is only the first hurdle, but it
>> is I think the toughest, because it requires a fundamental change in
>> perspective.
>>  I started studying smalltalk, and have kept at it, because it solves the
>> problem of making sense of the conceptually muddled third-hand OOP of PHP
>> (which I use at work); smalltalk is a profound language, constructed with
>> powerful and simple metaphors, and nothing would make me happier than to do
>> all my programming in it. I want seaside to take me there. Right now, it
>> can't--but it could. Without templating, or some equivalent acknowledgment
>> of the values and needs of the design field, it most certainly never will. -
>> Jared
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----
>> From: Julian Fitzell <jfitzell at gmail.com>
>> To: Seaside - general discussion <seaside at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>> Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2008 9:46:43 AM
>> Subject: Re: [Seaside] About Seaside 3.0
>>
>> Yes, I think this is the key point. I think there's a general
>> consensus among most Seaside developers at this point that we prefer
>> not having a template engine. I hesitate to make a blanket statement
>> such as "templates are bad", though, and as Colin said various
>> template systems have existed.
>>
>> When we started writing Seaside 2 (and again during the first few
>> successive minor releases), we concentrated on ensuring a layered
>> architecture. The goal was to allow people to use many of the layers
>> independently of each other and for alternatives to some of the layers
>> to develop.
>>
>> In the end, this hasn't really been exercised much but I'm sure the
>> boundaries are still defined enough for an interested party to easily
>> develop a template system (or resurrect Nori). If that layering has
>> become less defined somewhere and prevents doing so, I'm sure there
>> would be support for correcting that.
>>
>> Julian
>>
>> On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 10:47 AM, Marcin Tustin <mm3 at zepler.net> wrote:
>>
>>> If seaside is truly capable of being integrated with external libraries
>>> (and
>>> I cast no doubt on this), then it should be possible for the enthusiasts
>>> for
>>> templates to resurrect the template system, or write their own.
>>>
>>> On 7/12/08, Ramon Leon <ramon.leon at allresnet.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> I was talking about html templates, because, they are easier
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>  to build, and read, with css, than the seaside concepts, I think.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Then I agree with Colin, templates are a step backwards, been there,
>>>> done
>>>> that, glad we've moved beyond it.  Templates were never a good idea
>>>> because
>>>> they force you to mix in some kind of code in with them to do anything
>>>> at
>>>> all interesting, even a simple grid full of data requires at a minimum a
>>>> loop construct and html is a horrible syntax for a programming
>>>> language.  If
>>>> Smalltalk code is capable of representing the exact same data structures
>>>> as
>>>> html is, then we don't need html, and the tools for dealing with code
>>>> are
>>>> vastly superior to the tools for dealing with html.  Seaside's throwing
>>>> out
>>>> templates is one of its best and most bold features.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Ramon Leon
>>>> http://onsmalltalk.com
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
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>
>
>
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