[Seaside] rails niceties equivalents?

[Ash Wilson]

On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 9:49 PM, Julian Fitzell <jfitzell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't think it's that simple and I don't think we should discourage
> people who want to work on this. It is true that nobody has come up
> with a good paradigm for doing non-Session REST stuff in Seaside and
> also true that we haven't even come close to figuring out a good way
> to blend the two but I would suggest that in a huge number of cases
> you don't need both within the same "application" anyway.
>
> Seaside has always been capable of supporting other paradigms, though
> this should be more obvious again with the reorganization in 2.9. At
> its core, Seaside is a request and response dispatching engine. So
> while you are right that Seaside is not *currently* a RESTful
> framework, it wouldn't take much effort to make it support both a
> Rails-type model and the existing Session model if only someone knew
> what they wanted a request handler for the former to look like. And I
> think being able to easily develop stateless rails-style apps with
> full REST URLs but using the Canvas API would be a huge win for many
> people.

I for one like this idea a lot.  Generating HTML and XML with the
Canvas is one of the big draws of Seaside for me, as well as the
support for Prototype / Scriptaculous and the like.  I also like the
idea of having RESTful and non-RESTful applications coexisting on the
same Seaside server.

Philippe: having active projects supporting the framework is a
chicken-and-egg problem.  If it's difficult to do REST in Seaside,
then users seeking to do REST projects will use Rails instead; if
there's an option to do so, however primitive, some of them may stay
and support the development.  I would think that the intersection of
web developers interested in REST and those interested in Seaside is
non-empty.

I definitely agree that lack of a coherent persistence strategy is a
big problem, though (one that I've run into myself).

-- 
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