HREF Considered Harmful

I've also been working on a Seaside like web framework (in Java) that doesn't use continuations called Lakeshore. It uses threads and semaphores to handle call/answer across requests. This technique would run into the same problem serializing session state as continuations. How does Wee handle call/answer, Mike?

I answered my own question by digging further into Mike's blog. Which of course just raised more questions. Is there any way to do something like Seaside Tasks in Wee? Can you have code in an action "with" block after a call? Is that what the return_method is used for?

Comment by Vincent Foley

As an ex-Ruby programmer, and a reference on web frameworks, what is your opinion of Rails? As you must know, Rails is not in the same league as Wee or Seaside, it's more about connecting web pages and databases, but you must have some opinion on it?

Any thoughts on Wee vs IOWA too?

Mike Neuman and I have traded a few emails about IOWA and the things that he doesn't like about it, and I've taken a quick look at Wee. I think Wee is going to be an interesting framework, and one that I hope I can learn some things from as I continue to use and improve IOWA. IOWA today is a lot different from what it was when Mike wrote the book chapter on it. Well, that's not exactly true. The core of it still feels the same, but it has a lot more scaffolding around it to make it pragmatic for, at the least, my needs in a framework. I don't know if Mike is developing Wee because it's a fun thing to do, or because of work related needs, so that might be a telling difference, too, since almost all of my IOWA work has been driven by the need to have something that would do X, and not having a better alternative. Thus, for the most part, development has been driven by a simple pragmatic need to get stuff done.

Since I am here, and you are a captive audience, and since you are wondering what Avi thinks about Rails, I'll tell you what I think.

• David is fantastic at marketting, and that is getting a lot of people to dip their fingers into Ruby as a way to get things done. I think that is a good thing. He's managed to bring a lot of exposure to Ruby.

• Rails is _very_ different from Seaside/Borges/Wee and even IOWA. Very. Extremely. It's a "framework" that is actually a set of policies with supporting code. It achieves it's development ease by describing specific ways of doing things, and then making those ways easy. It is an interesting approach, but is certainly not for some people, and despite the existence of BaseCamp, it's still pretty young and untested and is still very much a moving target. My hunch is that it is going to experience some explosive growth and draw a lot of people to Ruby, then settle down, leaving room for some of the other frameworks to do their thing and pick up some mindshare. There are certain people, such as developers with a lot of experience in PHP/ASP/JSP, who are going to flock to Rails more than others.

Kirk: Sure, Wee is mostly a fun thing. It's very interesting to see what are the design decisions behind this and that. What I'd like to see is an implementation of the IOWA templating stuff on-top of the Wee kernel. Don't know if that makes sense, but indeed both would benefit.

I got now the continuations implemented, and it seem that there's no memory leak anymore (at least, the stress test over the last 5 hours with 25 sessions and around 3 million hits does not show an anormality... it stays below the 20 MB mark).

Rails? I never really got it to work on my machine... maybe I'm too stupid... or I tried a too early version... it's probably very elegant, but I think it's completely different... and what I want is a framework that I understand to 100%... that's probably why I wrote my own ;-)