[Seaside] What do you use seaside for?

[Julian Fitzell]

Welcome,

jennyw wrote:
> Just wondering what people are using Seaside for. Is it more of an
> experiment right now or are people using it to develop Web sites?  Also, 
> what types of things does one use Seaside for?

Seaside is great for doing Web Applications, not "Web sites" if that 
makes any sense.   The key point though, is that it adds a whole lot of 
benefit when you're doing stuff with lots of business logic, 
decent-sized models, etc.  It frees you from worrying about many of the 
details of putting the app on the web so you can focus on the 
applications itself.

But as you point out, that brings with it some trade-offs (see below).

> I'm working on two Web projects now and I'm looking around for various 
> things that may make it easier. 
> 
> One project is for a group I'm in that just wants to post various news
> bits up from time to time, minutes to meetings, agendas, and a few other
> simple things that should be updatable by various people in the group. 
> Something like Plone, Xaraya, or PostNuke might be overkill for this
> (and aren't really aimed at meetings, status of resolutions, committee
> reports, etc.), so I was thinking of hobbling something together.  I'm
> not sure how well Seaside would work for a CMS-type system, though,
> since pages cannot be bookmarked, which also probably means they can't
> be indexed by search engines.  Is Seaside the wrong thing for this kind
> of application?  I noticed that Gardner is kind of a CMS-like Seaside
> app., but looking at www.tric.nl I wonder what Google, for example,
> could do with it (I suspect not much). 

If you are developing something that needs a lot of bookmarking, then 
Seaside may get in your way.  There are ways to get around some of the 
limitations, but the bookmarking is similar to sending someone an Excel 
file: when you open it up you can see what tab they were looking at and 
what cell they had selected, but you don't know what any of their 
application settings were, whether they were in insert or overwrite 
mode, etc.

You can define multiple entry points into an application and you can add 
segments to the URL like the wiki example (and Gardner I think) does. 
But the URL the users see probably always going to have session 
information in them (you can sort of get around session IDs with cookies 
but we're never satisfied with the results and you can't replace page 
IDs).  The thing is that Seaside is aware of each individual page view 
(this is how it can make the back button work so transparently).

Anyway, there are solutions to some degree, but if you need a relatively 
static site that doesn't need a lot of session state and needs a lot of 
bookmarking, I'd look somewhere other than Seaside.

> The other project I'm researching is a Web shopping cart.  I don't think 
> I'm ready to write my own, but looking at existing projects, I'm 
> wondering if it would even be possible, long-term, to do something like 
> this in Seaside.  I'm not sure ... The inability to e-mail someone a URL 
> for an item that you find interesting seems to be problematic (and the 
> search engine thing is also problematic).

A shopping cart is an absolutely perfect example of a Seaside 
application.  And while you can't necessarily cut and paste the URL to 
someone else (you might be able to if you're at a point that doesn't 
require authentication - maybe) you can certainly have an "Email a 
friend about this product" link that generates a URL that will start a 
new session viewing that product.  So again, there are ways to solve 
these problems if the benefits of Seaside are great enough in the situation.

> So ... what would be a better use of Seaside? Is there a way around the
> session-in-URL problem?
> 
> Also, I'm just curious what interesting things have people been doing
> with Seaside? There seem to be a lot of people on this list, so I'm sure
> there's some cool stuff out there! I'm just not sure what it is since I
> couldn't find examples on the Web site, and only a couple on the Swiki.

To name just the few that I'm most familiar with: Derek's working on an 
airline ticketing system, Nevin has an online sales site, Avi and I 
developed a theatre boxoffice system, Andrew and Avi were working on a 
Point of Sale system, Andrew and I are currently developing an 
application to allow university professors to enter their CVs online and 
submit them all over the campus and to external funding agencies.  It's 
still a small group so far, but it's certainly being used.

Hope that's helpful.  If you have more questions, the list is pretty 
responsive and Avi and I are always looking for feedback.

Julian