[Seaside] OSCON "contest"

Avi Bryant avi at dabbledb.com
Wed Jul 23 00:11:39 UTC 2008


On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 3:46 PM, James Foster <Smalltalk at jgfoster.net> wrote:
> Hi Conrad,
> I agree that the competition is slanted toward Rails--but since it is being
> sponsored by the Portland Ruby Brigade that seems only fair. Given the
> expectations of the hosts and attendees, it seemed reasonable to try to bend
> Seaside into that sort of application. Some of Seaside's power is that we
> can do URL parsing if we need to do so. If nothing else, I'd like to avoid
> an argument about the relative merits of RESTful URLs vs URL
> rewiring--particularly in this crowd. In any case, I'll probably save those
> features for the end and if I run out of time I'll fail that part of the
> test.

I think trying to emulate Rails is missing the point - this should be
an app that plays to the strengths of Seaside and GLASS.  If this
means it has somewhat different properties (like no RESTful URLs),
then that says something interesting about the two frameworks.  But
building something that looks precisely like a Rails app, only in
Seaside, just feels disappointing.

One way to play to those strengths would be to have a much richer data
model than would be natural in a RDB app.  For example, I can picture
a hierarchy like:

Ingredient
  VolumeIngredient
     LiquidIngredient
     PowderIngredient
  WeightIngredient
  UnitIngredient
     CanIngredient

You could get some neat behavior out of this (when doubling recipes,
for example), which would be difficult to emulate in Rails.

Another way might be to have a step by step "recipe runner" , that
takes you through each step of the recipe statefully ("Mix the eggs
into the batter.  Press [here] when done.").  This could be done as a
WATask pretty simply.

Of course, not having any idea what the specs are going to be, these
might not turn out to be appropriate... but if you do end up with
extra time, these seem like more interesting ways to spend it.

My $0.02,
Avi


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