Constructive comments

Remember: My only goal is to bring Seaside further and that works only by breaking up these crusted structures that have not succeeded in at least documenting their code in some seven years or so!

Therefore, I am taking the freedom to publish interesting and constructive postings from the Seaside mailing list on my blog.

Here is the first one to which I would agree in most aspects (bold added by me, otherwise no changes or omissions):

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Hi "Smalltalkers"!

I can well remember Stephane Ducasse's closing words on last ESUG, when he said, that time is come for all Smalltalk users and companies to throw all there knowledge and efforts together to achieve the same aim, making Smalltalk more public and modern again.

A lot of smalltalk using companies suffer the same problems. On the costumer side it's hard to sell such an "old" programming language with outdated UI, large lack of advertisement and sometimes outdated non fancy UI implementation support. And on the other side the very hard task to find and get young already skilled Smalltalk developers.

I have the impression that some guys need to be brought back down on earth.

Seaside is a Open Source project which is squeak based. If I would blame the Seaside development team for working inacurate, regarding coding conventions, I could blame a lot of Squeak-Based projects on that. Some things like instance variable accessing is typically done without accessor- and getter-methods within Squeak.

I don't like that too, but to be honest, I don't have the time to offer a overworked version to the coreteam. I guess I'm not the only one here...

It's definetly true that Seaside is one of the most interesting projects in the Smalltalk market right now, giving companies the chance to offer something new and up-to-date.

But I also think it's merely impossible to develop a smalltalk project in squeak with the abillity to fullfill all advantages of the ported target systems, like VW, VASmalltalk, Gemstone and Dolphin...

It's the business of Cincom, Instantiations, Gemstone, ObjectArts and projects using Seaside for many years now, to support and influence and support actual Seaside development in squeak to assure the usability and optimization of Seaside Core.

You can't offer the world a kind of combination of domestic animal that produces eggs, wool, milk and can be grilled, or as we say in Germany "eine Eierlegendewollmilchsau" and additional to that: "for free".

Seaside is not a completed proprietary product, but everybody expects a robust in changes and optimal basis for writing a new next gerneration 15 years lasting Webapplication framework for the own product family.

Seaside is a sparetime project and it's a democratic project. Everybody can join the Coreteam and can expend time to push it forward.

Well, I'm happy for everyone beeing able to get some money out of Seaside. And I' m sure the whole Smalltalk community would be glad about more Seasiders and Seaside-Profiteers helping Smalltalk to become more interessing to newcomers again and support others to get a hand on Seaside.

Blogs like onsmalltalk.com for example, are worther than comments in alternating alpha release classes.

Thank's to everyone presenting, writing tutorials, books, blogs and thanks to the coreteam for the help and advice you gave to me past month!

Thanks Cucumber for speaking out load what you think. There are several point's I often have in mind reading over "Squeak-Code", but some points might be hard to be solved just because nobody knows, where the Seaside is heading to.

The actual effords in seperating plattformdependent coding from seasidecoding is an improvement I really appreciate. It clearly shows that these guys are willing to give a larger community an access to Seaside. I could imagine that this is a lot harder than just staying in Squeak.

Profit in mind or not, I don't care. They deserve it.

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My comments:

That sounds very much different from the many flames from the men in the barrel against me in their sun. See the "friendly" and constructive comments to my post about "Laws of life in a community", which I have published all, of course. In German one says: "The beaten dogs are the loudest in howling".

To Squeak:

I know too little about Squeak to make a judgement about its technical internals but I think that most of my proposals platform independent. Using symbols, using getter methods, using honest and concise namings, and especially documenting the code is definitely completely independent of any platform!

It's just a matter of good style and proper engineering!

I started this initiative with the goal to bring Seaside (and in a certain respect also Smalltalk) a good step forward and I was offering my help from the very beginning (which was rudely rejected). Also, most of the comments on the mailing list prove that the primary Seaside advocates feel very much disturbed by my initiative. That is good, because it's a prerequisite for breaking up these very crusted structures who badly failed to even document their code.

I again unconditionally invite all Smalltalkers of "good intention" to join in and to collaborate with me to bring our common tool major steps ahead. Maybe, this will be in competition to the "official Seaside" for a while, but competition is always good for business.