[Seaside] Some thoughts and cs to improve Seaside

[stephane ducasse]

Hi all

I started to really program with seaside and I bumped in the following 
problems: no class comments, limited examples...and I was in the train. 
And I did all the mistakes one after the other (no children, direct 
invocation of renderContentOn:...). So instead of complaining I would 
like to know what we can do to improve the situation. So here is a list 
of questions and simple cs to improve simply what can be done.


- How can I get the WAAllTests running?
I added a initialize method so that we can get AllTests up and running 
in the browser.

I guess like that so may be this should be in the distribution...
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- What is the process to add comments to seaside? Should we send 
something to this list and avi will review it and include it?

Even if this comment is copied an paste from the web site at least if 
it would have been there I would not make all my mistakes.

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- There are a lot of widgets but I could not find example (may be this  
is in WAAllTests)?
Is there a simple process to have examples of the widgets.

- Is there an FAQ? Is there a Wiki that we can add some examples?

- Is there a process to collect and document other widgets?

- Is there a database of widgets?

- I saw a demoes of seaside written in seaside and some other pieces of  
code. How can I find all
the projects available developed in seaside that I can use as examples?  
Would he make sense to have
www.seasideSource.com (a SqueakSource containing only seaside examples?)

Now some more technical questions:

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
------------------
What is the difference between a task and a component?

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
------------------

What is the difference between renderOn: and renderContentOn:?

I tried to explain it here.


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------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
------------------

In
WAStoreFillCart>>displayItems: aCollection
	| list |
	aCollection size = 1 ifTrue: [^ self displayItem: aCollection first].
	list := WABatchSelection
			 items: aCollection
			 link: #title
			 text: #subtitle.
	[self displayItem: (main call: list)] repeat

I do not understand the repeat.



------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
------------------
I used a batchSelection as follow:

renderContentOn: html
	
	html divNamed: 'bdList' with:[.
	html text: 'BDs'.
	html break.
	batch := WABatchSelection
			 items: items
			 link: #title
			 text: #title.
	batch renderContentOn: html]

my domain objects have accents in its string representation
and I do not know how from the model object I can specify that the
text should be encoded.

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
------------------
In a batchSelection I wanted to have my own element displayer. Because  
I would like
to have more information. Is it possible?



So if you really like seaside (like me for example) I can't imagine  
that you can only
use it without willing to help making it better. So I'm sure that if we  
take each us
some times to comment a bit the classes we know and the key methods in  
no time
we will get a much better version. I think that this is our  
responsibility as a community
to help seaside inventors to make it better.

Stef