Write an application in Seaside

My first entry about this was 3 years ago. I’ve been following Seaside since Avi switched from Ruby (he wrote IOWA) to Smalltalk.

Finally, I am doing Seaside development as my day job!

I have written about 4 play applications, nothing serious or substantial.

I would love to try my hand at a real world, heavy use application. But I don’t see the opportunities for that in the near future.

and it is pretty cool. I’ve taken over an older seaside app. I need to update it to the latest version and redesign the UI.

Sure beats hacking Java.

Oh yeah, I wrote http://badpage.net in seaside.

Currently “playing” with Seaside again, still revolutionary and loads of fun at the same time.

Have been steadily developing in Seaside for the last several weeks. I love this environment; it’s perfect for the kind of portal project I’m working on.

• How do you do SSL connections, for login pages & such?
• I need to start reusing the existing components (columnar reports, paginated lists, validated forms, other various decorators).

• Database persistence layer, through MySQL or an OO database. So far, I’ve just been doing very basic persistence through saving it in the image, just for development, but I’ll need this layer soon.
• Users and Permission systems. Pier has a unix-like permission system, but it’ll take some doing to figure it out and integrate with my app.
• I need some kind of page templating system (again, gotta investigate how Pier does it).
• Lack of proper REST support is troublesome. Maybe I can throw something together, here..

• Ok, this is so simple, but how do you do a Search & Replace inside a code browser window?

• How do you.. well, delete or garbage-collect objects? Say I have a component that’s tracking a list of shopping items. When I delete an item off the list, it still exists in memory, and examining allInstances of that class turns up that item. What still references it? How do I make it disappear?

• How to set up STOR / version control.

First step—installed Squeak and Seaside, played around with the Count example application.

• Ok, you can edit the ‘increase’ and ‘decrease’ methods from within the code browser in the Halo. How do you edit it from a code browser inside Squeak itself? It seems to accept the changes, but they don’t reflect in the running app. Is it because I’m using a “snapshot” of the package?

• What does the ‘WA’ prefix in front of all these Seaside classes stand for?

Every now and again I keep on going back to Seaside. Then I play with it for a while. Then something else come up and I need to focus on that.

So, I’m thinking of making this one of my projects, since I really have fun when I work in Squeak/Smalltalk.

Between this and that I stopped working in Seaside for a while, but I’m getting back into it again.

I’ve started writing an application in Seaside.

Its going very well so far. Getting used to the mindset takes a while, but once you stop trying to understand it as a “traditional” web application framework it goes easier.

Its powerful. Its fun!

I’ve written silly little applications in Seaside, but nothing serious. For example, I wrote a stupid application that would allow me to connect to my home computer and do text-to-speech so that my wife would be surprised. Seaside has come a long way since then.