[Seaside] Seaside vs. Traditional

[Colin Putney]

On 29-Mar-08, at 10:05 AM, Rob Rothwell wrote:

> From a business programming perspective, I don't want have to  
> understand web page layout or need a CSS designer.  I want to be  
> able to drag components around on the screen, wire them up to my  
> [well tested!] model, and have them behave as expected!  Visual  
> Basic the way I always wanted it to work (from a model perspective)  
> only for the web!

This sort of thing is possible, but it's not what Seaside provides -  
take a look at Dabble DB for draggable components.

Seaside is not meant to make understanding the details of web  
programming unnecessary. It's meant to make dealing with those details  
convenient. Web programming normally involves a lot of code to  
translate state back and forth between various representations.  
Seaside establishes conventions for how that should be done, and  
abstractions that reduce the amount of code needed to work within the  
conventions.

That's what people mean when they say the writing web apps in Seaside  
is "easy." They mean that it's a whole lot less work than is usual  
with web apps, not that they don't have to understand the web.

If anything, writing Seaside apps is conceptually harder than  
"traditional" web frameworks, because you have to understand not only  
the web, but the conventions that Seaside uses and how to get the most  
out of them. The nice thing is that, once you've got all that under  
your belt, you rarely have to think about it any more.

Rob, what is it that you want to accomplish? Perhaps Seaside isn't the  
right tool for the job.

Colin