Comments on: Pollak On Seaside

By: Adi Azar

Adi Azar — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 04:02:33 +0000

Very interesting, thanks for sharing with us.

By: Mark Miller

Mark Miller — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:16:45 +0000

@Alexis:

What you’re saying is true. There are books on the Smalltalk language, and on Squeak proper, but none (to my knowledge) on Seaside, or any of the other technologies Ramon talked about. Lukas Renggli has written up some excellent stuff on Seaside. He also wrote Magritte (I think). He has some PDF tutorial slides on it as well.

You can see his tutorial slides at http://www.lukas-renggli.ch/smalltalk/seaside. Over on the right sidebar you can select other sections of this site that cover Magritte and Pier. I know he wrote up a tutorial for Magritte.

By: Ramon Leon

Ramon Leon — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 17:58:26 +0000

I’ve written on those topics, browser around the blog a bit and you find some examples.

By: Alexis

Alexis — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 16:34:16 +0000

While I really like Squeak and the ideas represented in Seaside, I personally found it quite difficult to get start writing a real web app with it due to the complete lack of any significant documentation. Some of the tutorials are great, but I’m completely baffled about how to use Glorp and Magritte. So I had to fall back to symfony & php, which I’m not terribly happy about, but at least I do manage to get my projects moving forward. I *love* to see a really good book about how to do professional Seaside web apps. :)

By: Ramon Leon

Ramon Leon — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 09:22:43 +0000

Not really a fair comparison, ActiveSupport is an add on library. I’d bet the Squeak base image is more expressive than the Ruby standard library in most respects. Toss in libraries like Chronos if you want to compare apples to apples.

By: Giovanni Corriga

Giovanni Corriga — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 08:43:48 +0000

Piers may actually have a point, without knowing it ;-)

In the current Squeak image we have something like “10 minutes” to get a Duration, but not something like “10 minutes ago” to get a point in time. In fact, one of the Squeak Summer of Code proposed projects was to get the base image on par with ActiveSupport.

By: Ramon Leon

Ramon Leon — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 19:46:04 +0000

Piers, I don’t disagree, I just consider a well designed message protocol a DSL, they’re one and the same (in the right languages). Parsing is not a necessary attribute of a DSLs but rather a step required of “some” DSLs that require completely novel syntax. Lisp/Smalltalk/Ruby all do DSLs without parsing.

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 18:47:13 +0000

Piers: You only need a parser for an external DSL (what less powerful languages like C/C++/Java/Perl would need). For a powerful language like Smalltalk or Lisp you can do a DSL inside your language.

For example, there is no branching defined in Smalltalk. But of course someone would want branching so they added it (DSL style) into the libraries.

Of course some people will say that because the VM treats #ifTrue:ifFalse different that it is really part of the language. But that’s a silly argument. Once Exupery gets to cranking out fast Squeak code such optimizations (hopefully) wont be needed anymore.

By: Piers Cawley

Piers Cawley — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 17:53:53 +0000

Ah, sorry Ramon; just a hobby horse of mine. My complaint about the whole “It’s a DSL” style of talking about a well designed message protocol is that, by calling it a language we’re implying that it’s somehow rocket science, when really it’s a matter of using your implementation language effectively.

I try to avoid writing DSLs (parsers scare me), but I’m all for sweating to get a message protocol just right, and I think it’s worth drawing the distinction. YMMV.

By: Ramon Leon

Ramon Leon — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:46:24 +0000

@Dave, ramble on, I quite enjoy your ramblings.

I know about Borges, but I was under the impression it was abandoned. Does it have a community, is it in active user? Might be fun to play with.

By: Jason Rogers

Jason Rogers — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:42:03 +0000

IIRC, Avi worked on Borges for a while. No?

By: Daniel Berger

Daniel Berger — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 15:51:49 +0000

Seen Borges? http://rubyforge.org/projects/borges/

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 14:14:43 +0000

David,

if you find Xcode very productive, you might want to check VA Smalltalk’s composition editor which takes many of the concepts a step further.

And Instantiations is working on getting VA Smalltalk ready for seaside…

By: David Pollak

David Pollak — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:24:25 +0000

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s definitely the approach. While certain language facilities (e.g., closures) make certain approaches easier, I think it’s the vision that drives the reality.

Interestingly, the most productive desktop development environment I’ve ever programmed in (and I’ve programmed in a lot) is Interface Builder (now known as XCode.) WebObjects grew on top of NextStep and was a cousin code-wise and design-wise to Interface Builder. Avi claims a lot of his inspiration for Seaside from WebObjects. But I ramble.

By: Ramon Leon

Ramon Leon — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:44:27 +0000

No idea what you’re grumbling about, but Smalltalk code, in general, is written in a DSL style, so much so that it’s not worth an extra support layer to make Smalltalk prettier.

By: Piers Cawley

Piers Cawley — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 12:35:10 +0000

Mutter. Grumble. Chunter.

Just because you took the time to find the right method names doesn’t make it a DSL. It’s merely the least you should do.

But you’re bang on about what Seaside is, and why that makes for such a rich programming environment.