[ANN] AIDA/Web app server 5.4 beta released on Squeak

Philippe Marschall philippe.marschall at gmail.com
Thu Jun 14 20:41:44 UTC 2007


2007/6/14, Janko Mivšek <janko.mivsek at eranova.si>:
> Hi Lukas,
>
> Lukas Renggli wrote:
>
> >> - Back button supported (really needed?)
> >
> > As long as IE has a back button, billions of people will press on that
> > button every day. No matter if they have been told not to do so ;-)
>
> That "really needed?" is a question about Seaside way of back button
> support, which is more like "Undo", at least as we can see from a
> counter example.
>
> What I claim is that the users need back button just to go back in an
> information space where they come from. And that they always come back
> to that information in a consistent state.
>
> For instance, if I confirmed and order and then go back to a previous
> page, this page need to show me that order is already confirmed (that's
> what Aida do) and not to "undo" my order (as Seaside obviously promote
> with counter example?)
>
> >> - Not much OO, more procedural programming
> >
> > That must be a misunderstanding, this is completely wrong. Seaside was
> > always a framework written from top to bottom with objects. It
> > encourages users to use objects and provides a clean separation
> > between model and view.
>
> I admit that I forgot what I meant few years ago, but that statement in
> a bit different form:
>
> - Not much web, more procedural programming
>
> still stand. It is a critique on Continuations and its tree-like
> programing, which is just not natural for the web, because web is graph
> like (a directed graph of web pages)

That's right and can not be stressed enough:
Seaside works not the way the web works. It introduces ugly hacks
(continuations) that are only needed in very few academical examples.
Not working the way the web works means it doesn't scale (this has
been pointed out several times by the REST community). The ugly URLs
of Seaside serouisly complicates the the usage of Seaside application
for beginners. Furthermore Seaside is useless if you don't understand
continuations. So could anybody please stop using Seaside?

Cheers
Philippe

> >> - Url's not RESTlike
> >
> > The question about REST is more a religion than a technical question.
> > Fact is,  Seaside supports RESTful URLs with little additional effort
> > from the developer.
>
> More about that later in answer to Gianni.
>
> > More important is that Seaside provides a high abstraction over HTTP.
> > Developers don't have to think about request, response, urls, unique
> > parameter and field names, etc. Seaside does all that for you and let
> > you concentrate on what you really need, your application.
>
> That kind of abstraction is provided with Aida too. You also don't need
> to deal with requests, sessions, urls, fields etc. You just program web
> representations of your domain objects and that all.
>
> >> - Crosslinking
> >> - pages difficult
> >
> > I don't exactly understand what this means, but I think it is wrong (see
> > above).
>
> Thats about richness of navigation support. In Aida you can just provide
> a reference to some domain object and you got a web link to it, while in
> Seaside you can point just forth and back to components in continuation
> stack and to other registered components, right? In Aida you just need
> to register a root object of your domain model, links to all other
> domain objects are automatic.
>
> Best regars
> Janko
>
> --
> Janko Mivšek
> AIDA/Web
> Smalltalk Web Application Server
> http://www.aidaweb.si
>
>


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