[Seaside] Seaside 3.1 and Pharo issues

[David Carlos Manuelda]

Currently, there are issues with latest stable seaside and pharo, which have 
been talked before but seems not getting much attention, and some of them 
are important, so I want to do a little summary here.

First of all, I have to say that I am new on smalltalk, pharo and seaside, 
and started by reading Pharo by example, Deep into Pharo and Seaside 
tutorial by Hasso Plattner Institut.

One of the issues (minor) is an error in startup script for linux which 
comes with the Seaside one click experience tarball (3.1) which I made a 
patch to correct:

--- Seaside3.1-OneClick.app/Pharo2.0-portable.sh.original       2014-01-30 
12:28:38.000000000 +0100
+++ Seaside3.1-OneClick.app/Pharo2.0-portable.sh        2015-01-08 
10:47:31.306292421 +0100
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
 
 # execute
 exec "$LINUX/pharo" \
-       -plugins "$LINUX" \
-       -encoding utf8 \
+       --plugins "$LINUX" \
+       --encoding utf8 \
        -vm-display-X11 \
        "$image"


Other issue, that is specially important because it confuses new users (like 
me) is that there are things which only works with pharo3 and not with 
pharo2, and other, that do work with pharo2 but not in pharo3, which is 
confusing, because the one click experience tarball comes with pharo2, so I 
try to enumerate them here:

** Halos, and code editing:
   - Pharo2: OK, working normally
   - Pharo3: DANGEROUS, partially not working, and when it works it makes 
you lose code, I explain:
       x There are times in which you simply get the error: 
MessageNotUnderstood: receiver of "generateWithSource" is nil and you can't 
edit code
       x When you don't get the above error, then you can edit code but when 
trying to save, I detected 2 possible bad behaviors:
             - Save appears to work, but when you actually browse the code 
you changed via browser in pharo, you see your whole method's code is 
replaced by self methodHasNoSourceCode, in this case you lost your original 
code
             - Save not working, and debugger is raised, telling you: 
Unknown variable (the method name you just edited), for example, in my case 
I edited via browser the initialize method, and I got Unknown variable 
initialize.

** Seaside Control Panel:
    - Pharo3: OK, no errors
    - Pharo2: Not working:
        x Menu entry is missing
        x If you invoke it manually or you just use the one that is raised 
when you open firstly the one click experience image:
            * Right click not showing anything (in pharo3 right click 
displays add adapter and that kind of options)
            * Selecting an adapter and clicking "Browse" give you: Not 
understood message WAServerAdapterToolbar>>owner
            * Start/Stop options also shows above message not understood 
error



Summary: Again, I am not an expert, and some of these issues are not 
important enough, because seaside continues to work, but in my honest 
opinion, that incongruity of functionality between versions 2 and 3, do not 
make much sense, and make user to chose between comodity (seaside control 
panel) and functionality (halos).


Any opinions to this? Thanks for taking your time to read :)

David.