[Seaside] Design of WAComponent(s)

[Ramon Leon]

> No offense please but some answers show a lack of 
> appreciation for the users of Seaside. If you want to grow 
> the users base of Seaside, you need to answer the question of 
> Microsoft. If you dont, it will remain a great tool from 
> specialists for specialists. And fade in oblivion eventually.

Why?  Emacs and Vi do pretty well as editors without catering to newbies,
why the assumption that building tools for experienced programmers is
somehow fatal?  Seaside is a framework, not a component library.

> > I do not have the skills and time of lukas to create 
> widgets from scratch.
> > But I imagine that I should be able to reuse them.
> 
> Chapeau! That *IS* the main point. Those non-specialist that 
> might be attracted to Seaside and Smalltalk are very likely 
> not fluent in the details of XHTML, Java-script and AJAX. 
> Asking them to create new components from the given examples 
> will end in bad copy&paste programming.

How does that have anything to do with whether the core should or shouldn't
include generic components?  No one is saying reusable components are bad,
look at ShoreComponents, that is how generic components should be done, as
separate packages that don't bloat the core framework.  It'd be great to
have a wide variety of component options, no one disputes that, they just
don't belong in the core framework. 

BTW, anyone not fluent in the details of XHTML, Javascript and AJAX isn't
going to make it very far in *any* web framework.  If you want to develop
web applications, these things are pretty much required learning.  Seaside
may let you write XHTML, Javascript, and Ajaxy stuff in Smalltalk syntax,
but you still have to understand them to make effective use of those
abstractions.  There's no getting around that.

Ramon Leon
http://onsmalltalk.com