On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 5:36 AM, Torsten Bergmann <astares at gmx.de> wrote:


> sorry - but in which cave do you live in the last year? ;)
>

Easy there, I wasn't trying to be insulting. I'm quite aware that the
Seaside community is alive and well, and with all the different dialects it
runs on now, it's probably more popular now that it's ever been. By
obsolete, I don't mean "dead," I mean that it's no longer cutting-edge web
technology.

Seaside first came out in early 2002. That was almost 14 years ago! At the
time, templates were the rule. HTML pages embedded with bits of <?php echo(
user.name) ?> code all through them. Ruby was an obscure scripting language
that could be used to write CGI programs using webrick. "Serious" web apps
were done with Enterprise Java Beans, and Sun Microsystems was flying high.
The conventional wisdom was that "shared nothing" app servers were the way
to go—each request had to be completely isolated from other requests to
keep the server from crashing. Writing web apps involved a *lot* of string
manipulation to marshal state into forms and back, encode session ids or
database keys into link urls etc.

Seaside was a radical break from all that. It handled state management
completely and generated all the identifiers and URLs automatically. That
was mind-blowing. It attracted web geeks from all over the place to become
interested in Smalltalk and began growing the Squeak ecosystem. (I was one
of those people. I learned Smalltalk specifically to write Seaside apps.)

But again, that was 14 years ago. The web has moved on. Javascript
frameworks and AJAX make all that state management much simpler and easier
to automate. Continuations aren't necessary anymore. These days Seaside
isn't drawing web geeks into Smalltalk. In fact it's quite the opposite:
Seaside is making web programming accessible to Smalltalk geeks.

So when I told Chris not to worry about Seaside, what I meant was that we
needn't worry that Squeak is missing out on the influx of new developers
that Seaside is drawing into the Smalltalk community. Those days are over.
What *is* important is that we have options for web development in Squeak,
but I think Green Neon, Altitude and yes, Seaside, fill that role nicely.


> And before you declare other Smalltalk web frameworks as "obsolete": also
> Aida web
> framework had a new release in 2013 and Iliad is currently ported to work
> again on
> newest Pharo.
>

Actually, I don't think Aida and Iliad are obsolete at all. Iliad in
particular, is designed around tight integration between Javascript
components on the client and Smalltalk components on the server. That's a
completely reasonable strategy for today's web.

Colin
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