[Seaside] OSCON "contest"

Chris Dawson xrdawson at gmail.com
Fri Jul 25 05:10:40 UTC 2008


I do want to add that I was sitting in the audience and there was a lot of
interest and discussion about what is happening with Maglev and the benefits
that come with tools such as GemStone/S.  I think people were not exactly
sure of the process for building a solution using Seaside; this was, of
course, a poor format for learning Seaside because there was no time for
James to explain and type at the same time and stop for questions.  Also, it
is a very different set of tools and development process.  But, when I
started telling them that persistence just "is" and you don't have to do
what I did earlier that day in my day job, that is, trying to marshall
complex ruby objects into SQL, then their ears perked up.  With commentary
from Randal and comments from Monty, I think people learned a bunch.  There
were definitely some people that left with a whole new way of looking at the
world.

James, I thought you did a great job, and I was really honored that you
would be a part of the competition.  I hope you were able to have fun and
enjoy it, or at least can be relieved it is now over.

Next year perhaps we'll do what you've all suggested:  we can ask people to
come with a completed application and then say "Now you have twenty minutes
to make these five changes" and really let people see the power of Seaside
that comes when you refactor an existing application.  I say that as a
impartial observer and not as an official organizer of the event of course!

Chris

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 9:10 PM, James Foster <Smalltalk at jgfoster.net>wrote:

> On Jul 24, 2008, at 5:54 PM, Ramon Leon wrote:
>
>
>>> And if you were invited to a Ruby event and asked whether Seaside/
>>> Magritte could support JavaScript, would you tell them that
>>> they were wrong for asking?
>>>
>>> James
>>>
>>
>> Nope, but I wouldn't be showing them Magritte either, that's a mistake,
>> I'd
>> be showing them Seaside and Scriptaculous.  Magritte is complex in the
>> same
>> way Glorp is complex, building all those metadata descriptions is complex
>> and error prone and takes way too much time to use in a demo, especially a
>> time limited one.  Whipping up something in raw Seaside would be much
>> faster
>> unless you've rigged up some code generators to write the mappings
>> automatically for you.
>>
>
> I did try it both ways and building the editor by hand seemed to be more
> lines of code and I thought I'd go for something that might seem more
> familiar for the domain definition. Also, since I was building one component
> by hand trying the other as meta data seemed like reasonable variety. On the
> other hand, since I don't consider the whole experience a great success I
> certainly won't insist that I made the right choice.
>
>  Rails guys are accustomed to ActiveRecord and scaffolding which bootstraps
>> them up to a running system very quickly using code generation and a
>> generate and modify philosophy (this is also how they learn Rails).
>> Gemstone might eliminate the need for ActiveRecord, but Magritte is not at
>> all equivalent to scaffolding.  Scaffolding is much easier to hack and
>> customize because it's not a framework, it's just a bunch of generated
>> form
>> template code.  To compete against Rails in a time limited demo, you'll
>> need
>> something like a scaffolder, or a form builder you have a very deep
>> knowledge of so it can be highly customized on the fly.  To sell newbs,
>> you
>> need the scaffolder, because scaffolding code is an excellent way to teach
>> them how to write Seaside code, they don't need yet another framework
>> (Magritte) to learn.
>>
>
> Agreed. Maybe next time I'll channel the better-known "James" and try a
> demo of Web Velocity!
>
>  Ramon Leon
>> http://onsmalltalk.com
>>
>
> James Foster
>
>
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