On Sunday, 8. October 2006 14:12, J J wrote:

> I was in the anti "web as a platform" camp for a long time, but today it
> just makes sense.  I have to ask:  have you looked deeply into seaside?
> Using seaside you will be subjected to the visial limitations of  HTML, but
> you won't have to program "in strange ways".  The seaside frame work hides
> the state problems with HTTP.  Seaside also will do javascript if asked, so
> those GUI limitations wont be as bad as you would expect.

Yes, from what I've read Seaside is the most promising solution I have seen. 
At least they have some advanced concepts which go way beyond string 
manipulation in order to produce html. The drawback is that Squeak does not 
support Oracle except through ODBC (and I haven't gotten that to work yet).

The more I think of it, the more I think Michael Latta is right: "you need to 
know when you are talking to a remote object and handle that differently than 
those in memory".  Even if we could implement a shared object memory, that 
would still not solve all problems. 

Opening a file that contains a list of filenames already becomes difficult, 
even though we are only dealing with strings here. This is because for the 
operating system, a filename is something like an OID, but a remote file 
reader cannot know this. It will simply return a collection of strings and it 
takes an extra effort to distinguish between local and remote files. 

This makes me believe that there is a whole set of problems which are not 
related to technical issues like network latency, marshalling and the like 
but are rooted in semantics. Many objects seem to have an inherent "meaning" 
and it can become very difficult to transport meaning over the network even 
if we could send bits or even objects without any problems.  This is because 
we have to eventually leave the world where "everything is a distributed 
object". At this boundary we have an impedance mismatch which will cause 
problems.

This said, I believe this kind of stuff would be much easier if I stop 
accessing objects outside the "everything is a distributed  object" world. 
This means I should not talk about files and other location-bound resources. 
From what I know both X11 and SQLNET act in this resticted way.