46 posts tagged “seaside”
I was recently interviewed on both The Linux Outlaws and The Command Line podcasts. While the interviews are general coverage of my life so far, I did manage to sneak a bit of Smalltalk and Seaside content into both of them. I especially made it clear that I've been hacking Smalltalk since 1982, long before Perl was even around.
Next week at OSCON 2009 in San Jose is going to be a very busy week for me. I'm managing the Stonehenge/LinuxFund party on Wednesday night, which includes hanging out at the LinuxFund booth during the day on Wednesday. I'm also appearing at the usual O'Reilly Author meet-and-greet Wednesday evening.
I'm presenting my "Seaside: Your next web framework" advocacy talk next week in Omaha. Not once, but twice.
In this recent post, Loren Segal begins a nice long post with:
The interesting part is that playing with Seaside is completely unlike learning Smalltalk (unless you’ve never seen a language with lambdas). It’s a complete mind-blowing experience on its own level; a revolutionary way to look at web application development, not "let’s do what Ruby on Rails does.. in Smalltalk!".
Read the rest of the post... he's got a good simple example of what continuations are all about.
Since I spent 20 minutes just now trying to remember how I did this six months ago, the magic incantation to have Seaside respond at / instead of /seaside/ is:
WADispatcher default setName: ''
The InfoQ website interviewed me recently about Smalltalk and Seaside and Squeak. It's a nice article with a lot of external references. Check it out!
From the blog of Mark Driver, an analyst at Gartner group, we see:
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So Yeah.. I said it. Smalltalk is making a comeback.
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Bottom line:
1) If you have investments in Smalltalk consider the risk of the language to be lower over the next 3 years than the last 3 years. Smalltalk is cool again. Is it the start of a long term trend or a fad? Yet to been seen.
2) If you are BIG fan of dynamics languages (closures, meta programming, and all that cool stuff) then consider giving Smalltalk a look. You might like what you see. Its like Ruby but with bigger muscles. You think Rails is cool? Check out seaside.
In the end we’ll see a up tick in Smalltalk momentum over the next few years. I’m not entirely sure it will be enough to change the long term trend of a declining developer base but I does my heart good to see a “members only” jacket come back into style nonetheless.
I just finished watching a well-produced video of James Foster presenting MagLev, Seaside, and GemStone at OTUG in Minneapolis. You should also look at what James says about the video on his blog as well.
I was interviewed recently for the Geek Cred podcast. I got to sneak in some of my current views about Smalltalk's place in the ecosphere, as well as Seaside as the killer app for Smalltalk's resurgence. Check it out!
The framework itself is based on continuations and maintenance of session state. As with other rapid-development web frameworks, a very small amount of template code does a lot of work. In contrast to, say Ruby or Django, Seaside gives you far more capability of poking inside the running sessions, and even greater dynamism in seeing your code changes reflected on web pages. As a development feedback process, this is great. You can build your applications in baby steps, seeing the changes and improvements at each one, and getting immediate notification and feedback on bugs and glitches. Another respect in which Seaside is unusual as a web framework is that its "templating" language is just Smalltalk itself. While somewhat novel as a concept, in practice it seems little different: it is really just a matter of sticking some method names where you might put various meta characters and escape sequences in other frameworks.
