Learning Seaside
Notes from my learning experience with Squeak Seaside, by Ian Prince
21 April 2008

Seaside book ordered

I just saw that An Introduction to Seaside has been published on Lulu and couldn't resist placing an order.

I took the economy shipping option (to make an order of $34.78) so the book should arrive within a month (5 days to be printed plus 5 to 20 to be shipped to Europe).

I'll report back here on the actual shipping time and my thoughts on the book itself.

Update: The book, shipped from Spain via UPS, arrived here in Switzerland today, April 30th . 9 days total, not bad.

28 December 2007

Seaside on Amazon EC2

This is cool, the Seaside One-click Experience image running on a EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) node, as announced here.

8 December 2007

Easy sessions or easy bookmarking, choose one

Randal L. Schwartz nicely sums up a key difference between Seaside and traditional web frameworks:
In traditional web programming, the default is "sessions are hard, bookmarks are easy". In Seaside, the default is "sessions are easy, bookmarks are hard". You can't get both at the same time.
Non-automatic bookmarking, rather than hard bookmarking, might be closer to the truth, at least from a developer's point of view. And as Lukas Renggli says, with Gemstone "infinite memory" you can just keep your sessions for ever and never have expired URLs.

Update: there's an interesting discussion on handling expired seaside sessions here on Ken Treis's blog.

22 October 2007

Excellent Seaside tutorial from Hasso-Plattner-Institut

The Software Architecture Group at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Germany has an excellent step-by-step online Seaside tutorial in English here.

18 June 2007

Free Software

I couldn't pass on the opportunity to see and hear Richard Stallman talk at the University of Lausanne this morning.

Stallmann's talk Éthique et pratique du logiciel libre – given in excellent French – revolved around the four freedoms of "Free Software":

  • The freedom to run the program, for any purpose;
  • The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs;
  • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor;
  • The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Seaside is distributed under the very generous BSD-style MIT License. Thanks Avi! See here for a long discussion on GPL vs BSD.

Stallman briefly talked about e-voting which he doesn't consider secure enough today, nor in the foreseeable future (40 years). The video below (mp4, 2197k) is Stallman receiving applause for saying "il faut voter en papier", i.e. voting should be paper-based.

And Yves, if you're reading this, thanks for inviting me to lunch!

8 May 2007

Transparent Persistence

Dale Henrichs explains how GemStone persistence is transparent in Seaside:
a beginTransaction is performed when the request comes in from the http server and a commitTransaction is performed right before the response is shipped back out to the http server.
This seems to mirror the way ZODB transactions are handled in Zope.

Data transparency makes a big difference to rapid web prototyping, and I'm glad it has made its way into Seaside.

2 May 2007

Gemstone and Seaside

Well it looks like the wait for a bullet-proof and powerful object-oriented database back-end for Seaside is over, Gemstone/S Object Server for Seaside – as pre-announced in November - is being shown today at Smalltalk Solutions 2007 in Toronto.

This is great news. Now if only I can get a Beta invitation....

Update: Have an invite (thanks Monty!).

Update: Dale Henrichs has a blog (gem)Stone Soup covering tips and techniques for using GemStone/S and Seaside.

20 March 2007

Smalltalk in Flash

Vista Smalltalk Flash is an implementation of Smalltalk in Flash, which means it will run within your browser.

via lemonodor

13 March 2007

Sophie Book Server address change

The Sophie Book server address is now http://books.sophieproject.org instead of http://sophieproject.org:8888/

This version has the Seaside halos giving write access to the source-code turned off!

And thanks to an anonymous commentator: Release Candidate II ships... Better linux support, better video/graphics, server based book support, lots of bug fixes.

Lukas Renggli video from Cracow

Lukas Renggli's talk from the Studencki Festiwal Informatyczny in Cracow is now online, (61 minutes). PDF slides here.

The Comet demo at 36 mins 55 seconds is pretty cool. CMS Box - a netstyle product/service - at the 40 min mark looks intriguing too :-)

Seaside programmers don't think in pages but in components
21 min 49 second mark