Tuesday, July 22, 2008

OSCON: seaside tutorial

Randall Schwartz gave an interesting seaside tutorial on Monday. Here are the slides.

I have been through a few squeak tutorials and seaside tutorials but was interested to see the big picture presented in one shot. I enjoyed the tutorial but I have to mention a couple of things that bugged me.

- tutorial spent way too much time on the basics (of smalltalk) and not enough on the cool stuff that makes seaside completely awesome (e.g. didn't get to the last 1/4 or so of slides). This is totally understandable because I think it's expected that most people haven't messed with smalltalk before and the syntax would probably be pretty distracting on a first view. Maybe it's time to have a seaside master class.

- Randall made a comment about how other web frameworks have continuations now. He cited django as an example. Hmmm... that doesn't seem right. My best guess is that he confused ruby (which has continuations) and python. But as far as I know neither rails or django use continuations.

But in general it was well done (despite the typos ;-) and I hope to see a continued/growing seaside presence at OSCON. This is the 3rd year in a row that has had at least one presentation on seaside. Maybe we need an in depth look at dabbledb next year...

Here is a seaside tutorial I recommend.

[added: 2008-07-23]
Reading the above again, the tone seemed more negative than I intended. Just want to leave the final thought that I really enjoyed the tutorial. It was well thought out and well presented. It's just easier to focus on the little nits. :)

1 comment:

Randal L. Schwartz said...

Thanks for that. Yes, that's a great tutorial you linked to. Yes, I had to spend some time teaching smalltalk because I couldn't presume my audience.