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by Obie Fernandez.
Original Post: Seaside, Voodoo Magic and Selfish Open Source Software
Feed Title: Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?)
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Feed Description: Obie Fernandez talks about life as a technologist, mostly as ramblings about software development and consulting. Nowadays it's pretty much all about Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
The word Voodoo must have a very negative connotation for some people, which is probably why my last post was taken badly by some Smalltalkers. So I should clarify that I greatly admire Avi Bryant and I appreciate the merits of the Seaside framework a lot. "Voodoo", at least to me means magic (a good thing, as in Rails magic), combined with mystery (not necessarily bad, but certainly a deterrent to mainstream adoption). For example, here's some voodoo in Java.
In the comments to my last post, Mel Riffe reminded me of Arthur C. Clarke's famous quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic."
Is Seaside advanced technology? Is Rails? Depends on the perspective of who is judging. To people that consider meta-programming and continuations advanced technology, certainly both Seaside and Rails are magical. Their implementations are well beyond the understanding of an average programmer.
Murphee complained of my "very immature way of talking about Seaside" and I reluctantly agree. I suppose capturing the spirit of snarkiness in the back row was a bit immature, but then again I'm just doing what overactive bloggers do at conferences... capturing funny and memorable experiences into the historical record. No disrespect intended -- it was a fun and informative session.
Do I want to elaborate about Seaside? Well probably at some point I'll write down my personal opinion, but not today. Rabble summed up my feelings nicely in his comment, where he stated: "I think [Seaside is] useless for most web applications, but it looks like the right kind of framework for a an application with heavy workflow and that need to be stateful. A webmail app, perhaps a cms which produced a site with static html like movabletype or mir. That said, i agree, it's not a serious threat to any of the more traditional dry agile web frameworks like django or rails."
By the way, I met Avi in the hallway after the talk and among other things I asked him to write an article for InfoQ about Seaside, for Ruby programmers. He freely admits that he does not expect Seaside to go mainstream, and that's why he hasn't written it in Ruby. (Avi, if I am conveying that incorrectly please let me know.) We agreed on the importance of gaining critical mass for the ultimate maturity and success of an open-source product. Avi considers Seaside as already having critical mass, by one important measure: He used to be the only person answering questions on the mailing list, but now others have taken over and he almost never has to answer questions anymore. I say, "Bravo!"
In that sense, Avi seems quite similar to DHH. Both Seaside and Rails are selfish software. Avi seems to only care that Seaside meets his needs for DabbleDB, and if by chance it is useful to others then it is just a pleasant side-effect. DHH emphatically tells us that he doesn't care about Rails being useful to others, his main goal being to satisfy the needs of 37signals product development.
I speculate that both of them do care at least a little bit, unless of course the decision to go open-source was simply a prescient business strategy for ensuring cost-effective improvement and maintenance of the non-proprietary bits of their product line. Actually, it seems that Avi might care a little bit more than that, since he's offering support services, which are not part of the plan for DHH and 37Signals.
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