[Seaside] Newbie questions

[Paul Mateescu]

Hello!

I have found out a few days ago about the Seaside framework.
Of course, the capabilities of Seaside seem to go beyond any 
framework I am currently aware of. And it seems to be best fit for 
what I have to do: to redesign an Intranet which I developed 
originally in PHP/MySQL. The reason I have to switch from PHP are:
a. No matter what frameworks I use, changes are sooo slow to 
implement, and my customers require a high degree of flexibility and
b. Using PHP forces me to concentrate more on coding forms and to try 
to tie up various files in a coherent application, which is again 
very time and energy comsuming, rather than focusing on the features 
of the application itself.

So, I am very determined to switch to Seaside. OK, here are my questions:

1. I have gathered the available tutorials and articles available:
- A Walk On The Seaside from http://beta4.com/seaside2/tutorial.html
- HTML Render Reference from http://beta4.com/seaside2/renderer.html
- Seaside: Design Overview from http://beta4.com/seaside2/borges.html
- A Table Example from http://swiki.squeakfoundation.org/sea/62
- The (whole!) archive of this list

However, I feel I cannot go very far with these. I mean, I *could* 
go, but only if I trace the execution of the code, step by step (no 
class comments - sigh - ), and that would take me very much time. Can 
anyone point me to any other sources of learning?

2. At this point, I have a certain understanding of how to build  a 
WAComponent. Let me explain, by using an example (very simplified), 
what I would like to do and where I am stuck:
- the start of my application would be a page (A) displaying three links:
= customers
= orders
= payments
- When clicking on customers, another page (B) with the complete list 
of customers will be displayed. Each of the customers would have a 
link.
- When clicking on a customer, another page (C) with info about the 
customer will be displayed.
The problem is that I do not want the application to keep track of 
the pages so that I can go back to them by means of call - answer. 
Instead, I would like to have a top page that would be like a wrapper 
for the current page. When clicking on a link, I would like the 
corresponding page to replace the current page (that is, the action 
of the link would signal the top page that the page it contains 
should change to a different one).

How can I do this? I cannot use call-answer because I will then 
impose a very strict way of using the intranet and I would require 
the users to always go back. This would go against the way the 
intranet is made now, that is allowing the users to browse the 
information freely in as many ways as possible (of course, there are 
links to go back to the main page or to some sections).

I would use call-answer when a certain flow is involved (entering new 
information, validating, displaying a result or an error page and 
then retrying).

I have read the opinions about state and stateless, but I feel like 
my application must have some stateless parts.

There was aWAContainer mentioned in 
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/seaside/2002-November/000865.html, 
but it seems to be thrown out in the current release of Seaside. Is 
there any other class I could use?

3. I assume that if I continuously use call:s and no answers, I will 
end up with some sort of overflow somewhere in the framework. Is it 
correct?

4. WAView has dropped out from the framework? It was mentioned in 
this mailing list, for instance in 
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/seaside/2002-November/000855.html
However, I did not find a class with that name.

If any of these questions has been answered before in this list, 
please direct me to the month. I will pick it up from there.

Sorry for the rather long message. I will share a last thought: 
although Seaside seems like the best framework I have ever seen, the 
lack of documentation makes me wonder if I will ever be able to use 
all its features in a decent way. I haven't even begun to think about 
cookies, authentication etc. But anyway, great great work!

Best regards,

Paul Mateescu