On Tue, 3 Sep 2002 goran.hultgren at bluefish.se wrote:

> 1. Seaside. See http://swiki.squeakfoundation.org/sea
>
> Haven't used it myself but Avi Bryant can tell you more and it looks
> good. Fairly conventional approach (at least compared to number 2
> below).

Conventional?  Can you elaborate on this?  To my mind, the main
distinguishing feature of Seaside is its highly un-conventional use of
continuations to model control flow.  Typically, in web development, each
request/response is an isolated piece of code, with only crude
paramterized GOTOs (usually in the form of links to named URLs)
transitioning between them.  In Seaside, moving to another page is modeled
as a subroutine call, with a return value.  This means, among other
advantages, that multi-page processes can be described in a single
method; for example,

customer := self getCustomerInfo.
payment := self getPaymentInfoFor: customer.
(self processPayment: payment forCustomer: customer)
  whileFalse: [payment := self getAlternatePaymentInfoFor: customer].
self displaySuccessPage.

might trigger a sequence of pages in a shopping cart application.

By comparison, my understanding was that HttpView is intentionally
conventional and light-weight in its approach to session management.
What's somewhat unusual about it is its approach to HTML generation, which
is purely programmatic rather than template based.

Goran, you might be interested in the work I've been doing towards Seaside
2.0 - the lower layers, which are more or less complete, take a
programmatic approach somewhat similar to HttpView, although within the
continuation based session model (the higher layers will re-introduce a
template system).  You can grab a snapshot at

http://beta4.com/squeak/aubergines/source/Borges.st

and there is some (limited, unfinished, not really meant for end-users)
documentation at

http://beta4.com/squeak/aubergines/docs/seaside/borges.html

Cheers,
Avi