On Sun, 03 Jul 2005 03:23:03 -0700, Avi Bryant <avi at beta4.com> wrote:

> On Jul 3, 2005, at 6:09 AM, Blake wrote:
>>
>> I have a project right now I'd like to do in seaside, but it requires  
>> me to be able to read and display a table on the web, something easily  
>> done in other environments, but not in Squeak.
>
> Can you elaborate on this?  The point of comparison you gave was a  
> Delphi VCL grid, which has nothing to do with reading and displaying  
> tables on the web.  So do you mean "easily done in other web  
> environments, but not in Seaside" (in which case I'd love to hear more),  
> or do you mean "easily done in desktop environments, but not on the web"  
> (which is true, but not limited to Squeak)?

Well, the example given was sort of the ne plus ultra of Win32 components,  
for which there is no parallel in Squeak on the desktop. The tragedy there  
being that Win32 is dead, replaced by .NET and WinFS, whereas had such a  
thing been done in Squeak, it would still be viable. (Although, I guess  
Borland ported the VCL well enough to where the components are still  
usable.)

However, yeah, reading and displaying tables on the web is a cakewalk in  
other environments. I wrote an article on this back in 1999, when it was a  
relatively big deal, but you could use dBase to do it. (The dBase Inc.  
site is built on dBase, as a matter of fact, and was back then!)

Then, somewhere around version 6, Delphi 6 added some controls to make it  
possible, but it didn't really get easy enough (at least for me to do  
it<s>) till about 2001, with Delphi 7 and Intraweb (atozed.com). That's  
actually what I'm going to do this current project in. (Actually, I  
started to try it out in Seaside, but it's for a PDA, and HTML 3.2, so I  
didn't think I'd be able to do it in the narrow time frame I have.)

The next time I did it was in 2002, using the VS.NET beta. It only took a  
few hours, even though I hadn't used VS since 1996, and had never touched  
C# before. (But C# is the ugly bastard stepchild of Delphi, so it's not  
that surprising.)

Recently (2004) Alpha 5 version 6 gained the capability, and made it  
pushbutton easy (but I still wouldn't recommend it).

In each case, we're talking about showing a grid and allowing users to  
directly edit the values in a table. Nothing super-fancy, just plain  
edits, check boxes, and combo boxes. I'll be putting up an example in the  
next few hours--well, probably Monday morning, since I'm close to packing  
it in for the night.