On 31.12.2011 18:58, Lukas Renggli wrote:
Let's take this on the Pharo mailing list.
I do think that Seaside should be considered for being part of the Pharo infrastructure. At least the Core and the basic HTML rendering (i.e., without JQuery, Magritte and Pier).
And I also think your analysis is not accurate. Here is why (I apologize for the long list):
1. Seaside is quite well documented. There are two books describing it. There are a tone of examples documenting all sorts of features. There comments are not as good as they could be, but there are lots of comments.
2. It is quite well tested. This part can be improved, but the core has some 80% coverage.
3. I am not the only one that knows how to mingle with it. To give some examples, more than 30 people helped fixing some intricate bugs directly in the core (http://www.seaside.st/community/contributors). I would also mention that countless student projects are on Squeaksource. So, maybe it's not that difficult.
4. The core is quite stable since more than 10 years. There were changes, but they were mostly related to new features and bug fixes.
5. The main point of using this infrastructure is not to replace Morphic, and to empower more people to build more applications. For example, the Seaside counter has less than 5 lines of code in total (and one instance variable only). This is really tiny for the amount of things it offers (you can even step through it with a debugger). And it is highly extensible (subclassing), too.
6. It's actually not that large: the core has 152 classes, and if you consider all the other packages, helper classes and specialized frameworks (but without the example code), you get some 1162 classes.
7. But, perhaps the most important part is that there have been literally thousands of applications built on top of it. Not all of them are useful now, but they were when they were built. And it seems that people can build one quite fast without much knowledge of the web either. That is the whole point of this infrastructure. Esteban even used it for building commercial applications. I built a couple, too. The whole of Pier (SmallWiki) is now using this infrastructure, too.
I am not saying that Seaside is perfect. There are quite a couple of things I would like to enhance (for example, the AJAX ideas from Reef, or the components from ExtJS), but it has proved to be quite solid until now.
So, before dismissing Seaside, perhaps it would be useful to actually look into it.
rofl, made by day Can we turn this into a meme? Cheers Philippe