[VERY DEEP QUESTIONS] For me

Nevin Pratt nevin at smalltalkpro.com
Wed May 21 19:35:42 UTC 2003


Stephane Ducasse wrote:

> Hi nevin
>
> why the buttons of your page get always redraw starting from the 
> center. I found strange when browsing the babies
> that the buttons shows up that way.



Right now the entire page is redrawn whenever a button is pushed.  This 
was intended to be only temporarily that way.  Search the Seaside 
mailing list archives for a thread titled "[Seaside] JavaScript anyone?" 
for a discussion on alternatives.  For most web sites, to avoid 
reloading the entire page when cycling through images of a gallery, 
JavaScript is used.  And, that is certainly also doable with Seaside, 
but I am leaning towards using iframes, as suggested by Alain Fischer in 
that thread, to do the same thing.

However, it isn't a high enough priority right now to fix, because 
reloading the entire page certainly works too, but that is exactly why 
it is a little "strange".

>
> I was thinking that seaside was really good for complex call flow with 
> backtrack state
> and I do not see that much in your site. Why plain HTML or other way 
> are not simple?
>
> I'm curious to know how SeaSide helps you.



For any site, Seaside helps in direct proportion to how dynamic the site 
is.  For a purely static content site, Seaside actually just gets in the 
way.  I would just use Comanche for such sites.  However, most sites 
tend to grow in the direction of being more dynamic, and as they get 
more dynamic, Seaside's benefits become more and more apparant.

As to my wife's "bountifulbaby.com" site, overall in my opinion it is 
just crossing the threshold for dynamism, where Seaside is only just 
beginning to show some benefits.  There's actually two distinct areas to 
the site.  There is an online "store" (accessable from the "Accessories" 
button, as well as from the pictures at the bottom of the main page), 
and then there is the "reborn dolls" side of the site.

For the "reborn dolls" side of the site, there is very little dynamic 
content: (1) there is some dynamic meta tag stuff being generated that 
most users are never aware of, (2) the home page randomly picks an image 
from the gallery with each access, and then provides a gallery for 
navigation, (3) the "Past Work" page is dynamically generated, and (4) 
the custom order waiting list information is generated dynamically from 
database information.  But overall, you can see that this isn't much 
"dynamism", and so Seaside helps very little on this side of the site.

For the online store side of the site, though, it is more dynamic, with 
credit card processing, shopping cart, items and item categories 
generated from database data, etc.

But overall, as I said, I think this site is just beginning to cross the 
dynamism threshold where Seaside shows any advantages at all.  But as 
the site grows, I expect the scales to tip more and more toward Seaside.

For *very* dynamic sites, in my opinion Seaside is unsurpassed.

Nevin








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