This week, Kevin Yank is reporting from OSCON 2006 in Portland, OR.
Avi Bryant has the dubious distinction of being one of the few web geeks with an avid interest in Smalltalk, and has created a web application development framework that suits his particular fancy. That framework is Seaside. As it turns out, Seaside also breaks a lot of the conventional wisdom that is embraced by many other web frameworks, and those “heresies” are what Bryant focused on in this talk.
The first of the rules broken by Seaside is that web designers are responsible for producing HTML code. Many other frameworks go to great lengths to provide sophisticated template systems that allow developers and designers to work in tandem on the HTML of an application without stepping on each other’s toes (in theory). Seaside abandons this approach, and generates all HTML code from Smalltalk code within the application, based on the theory that, if the HTML code that is generated is semantically meaningful, all the designer should really need is to write the CSS code that styles the HTML.
One of the nice side-effects of this approach is that you don’t need to lose sleep over things like assigning names to form fields, as these can be generated automatically by the framework, in much the same way as session IDs are generated by most other frameworks.
Speaking of sessions, Seaside doesn’t bother serializing them, which is something that most other frameworks go to a lot of trouble to do. Bryant argues that the problems that serialized sessions are designed to solve—the need to share sessions between load-balanced servers, and the need to fail-over in the event of a server crash without losing any active sessions—are non-issues. As a result, Seaside stores all sessions in memory.
Again, this has freeing consequences. Sessions can contain crazy things like closures, or even continuations—meaning the code that responds to a request can effectively “pause itself”, store its state (the execution context) in the session, and send a response to the browser that prompts the user for some information. When the next request comes through with the information required, the execution context is retrieved from the session and the code continues to execute where it left off. Suddenly, multi-page form workflows become trivial not only to implement, but to modify (say, by reordering the steps).
Seeing this stuff in action is frankly astounding for someone like me who spends most of his days stuck in the PHP/Java/whatever mindset, and the natural tendency is to just assume that this is cutting-edge, experimental stuff. But Seaside is at the heart of applications that have been in production use for up to five years at this point!
Of course, Seaside is based on Smalltalk, which is a development environment that is quite different from the mainstream platforms. So this isn’t something you can just hop into and get something running in a couple of hours. But there are certainly lessons to be learned from the common assumptions that Seaside has refused to accept.
Kevin YankKevin Yank is an accomplished web developer, speaker, trainer and author of Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL and Co-Author of Simply JavaScript and Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong! Kevin loves to share his wealth of knowledge and it didn't stop at books, he's also the course instructor to 3 online courses in web development. Currently Kevin is the Director of Front End Engineering at Culture Amp.
