Giles Screencast on Seaside and Rails
For those who may not be on the Seaside mailing list, Giles just posted a couple of screencasts about Seaside and Rails. If you’re a Rails guy, go watch them, you’ll learn something about Seaside. If you’re a Seaside guy, watch them to learn a little about the Rails approach. In either case, go watch them, the second one especially, it’s an excellent screencast. This may be a preview of something he might present as OSCON 2007. My favorite quote from the video…
“Although I love Rails, I’m going to find a way to do stuff in Seaside as quickly as I can, because it’s just so cool.”
Seems people are starting to understand that having the power to write desktop style applications (i.e. insanely complex) on the web might be something worth having. I think the Seaside community is going to have quite a few Rails converts over the next year or two. Ruby seems to be a gateway drug to Smalltalk and Rails I think, will be the gateway drug to Seaside.
at: "Screencast: How to Package Smalltalk Code with Monticello";
at: "Screencast: How to Build a Blog in 15 Minutes with Seaside";
at: "Popular Posts";
“having the power to write desktop style applications (i.e. insanely complex) on the web might be something worth having”
GWT is a mainstream answer to this question (haven’t tried it myself).
Unless it’s a continuations based server, I don’t think it allows desktop style applications (i.e. insanely complex) to be written. By that I mean, if you have to deal with the request response cycle at all, then it doesn’t qualify in the way I meant.
To Jonathan:
Seaside handles AJAX just fine. No need for GWT.
To Ramon:
GWT is the Google Web Toolkit. It’s an AJAX development tool. It allows developers to write AJAX code totally in Java. The tool translates the client-oriented Java code into the appropriate Javascript to carry out the desired actions. It may generate server side Java code to receive AJAX requests as well. I’m not sure about that part. I’ve only read about it. If GWT is anything like what I’ve seen with other AJAX frameworks, then Seaside is still better in terms of the lines of code you have to write. I haven’t tried it yet so I can’t say whether it’s definitively better. One of the challenges any AJAX framework has to deal with is different Javascript working on different browsers.
By the way, I liked the screencasts by Giles. He presents things in an easy to follow, appealing way, and has a sense of humor, which is nice.