"I want to learn about Seaside Web Development and VisualWorks - what is the best way to do this?"

Here is how to get started with Seaside and VisualWorks for a newbie. Suggestions, corrections and feedback are very welcome.

This link below will download our latest beta of our non-commercial build of the product, in which we will officially support Seaside 2.8.

CST NC beta supporting Seaside 2.8

Mount the .iso or burn to a cd. Install VisualWorks (choose not to install the ObjectStudio products unless needed).

Start visual.im (found in C:\Program Files\Cincom\vw7.6\image ) by double clicking on it, then, in the VisualWorks launcher, choose the menu file-> save image as, and type in Seaside, then press the save button.

Install the Seaside framework, by opening the parcel manager (second icon from the left, in the top left of the VisualWorks launcher. From the list choose "Seaside Web Development". In the top-right panel you will see a list. In the top of the list is "Seaside [2.8......]"; click on this to select it, then right click and choose - "Load". Note in the list beneath "Seaside [2.8......]", there are many additional add-ins that you can load, and see examples of.

This screencast shows an example of loading Seaside as we did above, then goes on to create a simple "Hello World" application.

This Seaside Tutorial is the most current, being based on Seaside 2.8.

A few things in this tutorial are squeak specific. You can skip the installation instructions in chapter 2, because we have already done this, and you should already be looking at the dispatcher view of Seaside in your web browser. Also where the tutorial asks you to insert a "break" message, the VisualWorks equivalent is "halt" (without the quotes).

To learn the basics of creating a class and the development tools, look at these screencasts under the "Basic Introduction" and "Development Tools" categories. These screencasts are great visual ways to get up to speed quickly.

This link takes you to screencasts demonstrating many Seaside 2.8 add-ins. You can walk

Here are some screencasts showing some example applications.

For learning Smalltalk in depth, here is an Extensive Smalltalk Primer by one of our customers. It is very good..

A Cincom engineer (Michael Lucas-Smith) will be giving a presentation introducing Seaside, and discussing Cincoms plans and work with Seaside, on Thursday, Nov 22 in Ottawa.  There will be a contingent of Cincom Smalltalk engineers there to answer your questions.  If you are local, or a reasonable drive, don't miss it!

Many have noted that Cincom Smalltalk has taken a stance in supporting and contributing to an outstanding open source web framework known as Seaside.

The other day here, I posted what users could expect to be different, with our supported version of Seaside, which will be released in Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks 7.6.

But we have also been quietly planning to do more with Seaside. I am happy to be able to announce a new product that the Cincom Smalltalk division will be launching in 2008.

Web Velocity ^{TM by Cincom Systems}

Web Velocity is the synergistic combination of Cincom Smalltalk, Seaside, Glorp (Object relational mapping software) and tools along with examples and documentation. This product will be targeted at folks wanting a development product to do leading edge database-to-web applications. On one hand you could compare Web Velocity functionality to Ruby-on-Rails (RoR), and we should certainly be able to compete in that market. On the other hand, we hope that the combination of products and tools make it easy for newcomers to use, and help grow the community.

As product manager, part of my focus is on how to grow the Smalltalk community. This is our best answer to date, and I am very excited about it.

- Arden

The final release of Seaside 2.8 has been announced.

James also noted this here.

Seaside 2.8 will be formally supported in Cincom Smalltalk in our next release, currently scheduled for Q1 2008.

So what? you might ask Seaside runs on Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks now.

So what does this mean for our customers? What changes are there?

Here is what will be different in our first supported release:

1) Formally supporting Seaside for our customers

2) Internationalization support

3) It runs on top of our unified Opentalk Framework

4) We will support changing the root seaside path (/seaside/)

5) We will provide a web ui testing framework based on SUnitToo for testing Seaside components

Many consider Seaside to be the "killer" application for Smalltalk (a good thing if you are not familiar with the term :-) ). Seaside brings structure and a fresh approach to Web development, leveraging technologies like CSS and AJAX.

A new tutuorial can be found here.

Seaside is worth checking out!