[Seaside] Javascript rendering and dynamically bound variables

[Lukas Renggli]

> The thing is I'm using a dynamically bound variable to hold the stream
> to render the javascript on and I'm not sure that's considered good
> style in Seaside.

The use of dynamic variables is not that common in Smalltalk as it is
in lisp-like languages, but it is certainly an option. Dynamic
variables have their price, for a benchmark check Table 5 in
<http://scg.unibe.ch/archive/papers/Denk07cChangeboxes.pdf>.

> What do you think? Can you come up with other alternatives? Which approach
> do you prefer over the other and why?

You might want to check out the Scriptaculous and JQuery bindings for
Seaside. These libraries don't use a global stream object, but instead
the the stream is passed into #printOn: that recursively traverses a
tree of objects to generate the Javascript code.

Cheers,
Lukas

-- 
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch