Smalltalk & Seaside vs. Ruby & Rails

Just wanted to comment that Seaside is not the only Smalltalk framework out there. If you're interested, you may want to take a look at the following:

Aida (http://www.aidaweb.si is a web framework that's been around for quite a longer while and includes very nice features like Ajax for free.

Also, Iliad (http://www.iliadproject.org) is a smaller, lighter, faster framework that also provides Ajax for free. Being small doesn't compromise its power though, it's being successfully used in commercial apps.

To top it up, you may wanna take a look at the latest thing going on in the Smalltalk web dev community: Amber (http://amber-lang.net), formerly Jtalk, which is a Smalltalk dialect that runs on top of the Javascript machine, so you're actually building your site from _within_ your site, live!

Just my 2¢ ;)

The creator o Seaside, Avi Bryant[1], talked about this on a great presentation: Rails is Obsolete (But So's Everything Else)[4].

Which has many of the points of an earlier talk: Django is obsolete (but so is everything else)[5]

[1] http://www.quora.com/Avi-Bryant Also creator and founder of Smallthought Systems, which was later sold to twitter[2], one of the core developers of Maglev (a Ruby implemented in Smalltalk), Monticello version control system, and many other cool stuff[3]

[2] http://blog.twitter.com/2010/06/more-than-dabbling.html

[3] http://blog.redtexture.net/2010/10/30/avi-bryants-presentati...

[4] http://confreaks.net/videos/359-gogaruco2010-rails-is-obsole...

[5] http://python.mirocommunity.org/video/1186/djangocon-2009-dj...

What's the summary of what happened here? It's a little bit hard to tell because none of the blog posts seem to have dates (though maybe I could check RSS).

From the discussion here, it sounds like:

1. futuremint was developing a bunch of Rails applications in Rails 2 + Ruby 1.8.x.

2. futuremint got bored of coding in Rails, was tired of Ruby being slow, and yearned for an IDE.

3. futuremint checked out Smalltalk/Seaside and Common Lisp. He liked it for a while (for reasons that seem unclear). There doesn't seem to be much discussion of continuations (which seem most salient to me as an outsider, but who knows!). Refactoring in Smalltalk is easier (which isn't surprising given that it's a really simple language).

4. futuremint returns to Rails 3, Ruby 1.9. Things are faster, he uses an IDE, and he is content with his ability to meta-program even if the syntax is ugly. futuremint is tired of lots of boilerplate and conventions because Smalltalk is so small, and he's tired of not having a community like Ruby/Rails in either Smalltalk/Seaside or Common Lisp.

Smalltalk/Seaside is a brilliant environment. Being able to debug a web application back end while it's running is really handy.

Having said that, this article has a bizarre name. There was nearly no comparison of anything. The guy actually likes and uses both systems.

The author's other posts about smalltalk can be found at http://futuremint.com/?tag=smalltalk

The most recent post, which won't show up at the last link because it isn't tagged, is http://futuremint.com/once-again-enjoying-ruby

Interesting article, convinced me to just buy the PDF book "Dynamic Web Development with Seaside" to support the developers and authors. Hopefully this article will be expanded with future articles to cover more personal experience with Seaside.

It took me a long time to get into Smalltalk. In the early 1980s, my local Xerox Special Informations Systems sales/support guy let me use it on my 1108 Lisp Machine for a while, and I did not get it. Long story short, it took me about 15 years to get comfortable with Smalltalk since I only tried it sporadically.

Unfortunately, my customers always seem to want to use mainstream platforms like Java/JSP/Tomcat/Java EE6/Rails, etc. For personal projects Seaside makes a lot of sense to me. Seaside is easy to deploy also (I wrote a blog abut this a few years ago, and you can find better sources on the web).

I've been eyeing Seaside for a year or so but have never found a really compelling reason to take the plunge. It would've been nice for the article to give pros and cons of both, instead of simply pointing out that it exists and what it's written in.

Kind of random that this got picked up... I wrote that post a long time ago... I think maybe sometime in 2009.

I still maintain a production application I wrote with Seaside, however my day job now entails Sproutcore & Rails.

> once you use an IDE that actually IS "integrated" as the acronym suggests, you will never turn back.

If you're unfamiliar with Smalltalk environments and are wondering what this actually means, watch this 3-minute video showcasing a Smalltalk IDE -- the class browser, method finder, and debugger:

http://vimeo.com/27850933

Anything else seems so... primitive by comparison.

Smalltalk's great drawback is over-reliance on the image:

"If your program misbehaves (and they always do) and corrupts the state of the process, things get tedious. Say you have a test that somehow failed to clean up properly. In a conventional setting, you fix the problem with your code, and run the test again. With an image, you have the added burden of cleaning up the mess your program made. [...] In general, Smalltalk makes it hard to [...] separate the application from the IDE." -- http://gbracha.blogspot.com/2009/10/image-problem.html

I really wanted Seaside to become a legit competitor to Rails. I think that the component/continuation model is awesome when you aren't building something that needs to support a million concurrent users. But, the Seaside ecosystem is (relatively) dead, and I can't justify reinventing the wheel for all of the plugins available for Rails.