Seaside and Smalltalk Interest Spreading
By Ramon Leon - 12 November 2006 under Ruby, Seaside, Smalltalk
Here's a nice quote from a Java/Ruby programmer's recent blog entry on Seaside...
Frameworks like Struts or Webwork tries to model this kind of flow in static XML configuration files, which is at best, a hack. Rails tries to do this in its own code by convention, which is a good attempt but the way Seaside does it is the best I've seen so far.
That's the kind of thing I like to see because I still think Seaside is the Smalltalk killer app. If Smalltalk is going to come back into the mainstream, Seaside is going to be the vehicle of that change.
Comments (automatically disabled after 1 year)
It's a common misconception that we don't have version control, we do, and it's quite a bit nicer than version control based on text files. Look at Seaside itself, it's an open source project where many developers work on and merge code constantly, works great.
Most load balances have the options to stick a session to a server, since sessions are a common requirement among many frameworks.
Seaside isn't stateless, so no, it won't scale the way a stateless server does, nor is it meant too. It's meant to write complex stateful "applications", not just websites, that have lot's of workflow and would be hard or impossible to write otherwise. However, don't think it won't scale, it's simply a matter of hardware.
I've always found Seaside to be compelling, but I've always wondered, how can multiple developers work on code when the language is VM based? (I'm used to version control systems..)
Also, application scaling seems to be an issue. From what I read, a load balancer like Pen must be used, in order to ensure that a user always returns to the application instance that they first visited. (Most load balancers distribute the load evenly). Is this as big an issue as it seems? I hate to bring up scaling as it is often used against dynamic languages, but it seems to me that the next myspace killer won't be developed with seaside. However, Seaside does seem to be well suitable for business oriented intranet apps.