Liking Seaside
Chris Petrilli likes Seaside quite a bit:
I’ve been playing with Avi Bryant’s continuation-based web framework Seaside, which is written in Smalltalk. Wow. That’s all I can say. After some recent work with Rails, I had come to admire the cleanliness of the framework -- even if, on occasion, I had some complaints about short-cuts taken that need not be necessary. Compared to Seaside, Rails seems to me to be a jalopy. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a seriously pimped out jalopy, but the easy with which one can build interactivity and modify it on the fly with Seaside is mind-blowing.
Now, he does have some concerns about database interfacing - MySQL in particular. MySQL is a database that we are looking at seriously.
Comments
Database Support
[Runar Jordahl] November 23, 2005 13:47:53.160
"MySQL is a database that we are looking at seriously."
That is good news, but it would also be useful to have native support for SQLServer.
Native?
[ James Robertson] November 23, 2005 14:38:35.910
Comment by James Robertson
What's "native support" to your mind?
ODBC
[Runar Jordahl] November 23, 2005 14:54:09.509
I meant connecting directly to the interface of the database, like the OCI libraries provided for Oracle. However, you do support ODBC and from what I have been able to dig up (since my last post), that is really all you need for SQLServer. So I guess there is no need for "native" support for SQLServer.
MySQL and SQLserver
[Chris Petrilli] November 23, 2005 15:31:07.426
It used to be with SQLserver that you could talk to it using ctlib, and perhaps you still can. The Sybase heritage is still there. It requires a couple undocumented tweeks to the server to work, though, so cavaet emptor. Otherwise, it's really a Windows-client only solution, so ODBC is a good solution. MySQL, though ... while I hate it with a passion for it's brokenness and bad behavior, it is all over the place, and I think a out-of-the-box driver for it would be especially useful. Especially if it was written entirely in Smalltalk, like the Postgresql driver, so that it didn't require any funky configuration. This helps with the Rails people jump-starting development.
Database Support
[Tom Sattler] November 23, 2005 15:43:48.655
Store for Sybase would be good too. I know it exists as a goodie, but I can't use it at this company as a goodie.
Bah... interfaces...
[ cdegroot] November 23, 2005 17:25:03.788
Comment by cdegroot
What we need is the dreaded F-word. A Framework.
Under the name Kilauea I've been developing such a framework - it's lightweight, metadata-driven, and gives you out-of-the-box all you need: Seaside in front, persistence support in the back. Just ask Kilauea to setup a new application for you, and you can start typing in domain and UI code. The database is created and a Seaside app with the first screen pops up when you point your browser to it.
Kilauea is for Squeak and Magma, but I think someone should repeat this exercise for Squeak and/or VW and MySQL. I think MySQL sucks, but MySQL sells, so...
Of course, with O/R mapping coming into play, it will be a bit bigger task. But if you have that framework, I can't imagine anyone caring about how you actually interface to the db.