I'll be speaking on April 25th at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels. Here's the abstract of my talk:
On the web, abstraction is a dirty word. The dominant paradigms and philosophies of web development -- CGI, Servlets, Server Pages, REST-- provide only a thin wrapper around the low-level details of HTTP, and encourage you to use the rough stones of the transport protocol as the direct building blocks of your application. Web developers by and large reject any further abstraction in the way that assembly hackers once rejected structured programming: it's too inflexible, uses too many resources, and above all, it doesn't let you see what's *really* going on. As a result, web applications suffer the same problems now that assembly language programs did years ago; they're fragile, verbose, difficult to maintain and ill-suited to reuse.
That's not to say that better abstractions aren't available. The Lisp and Scheme communities have been working on them for years. Paul Graham's ViaWeb pioneered the use of closures, not query parameters, to capture application state in each link. Christian Quiennec showed how to use first class continuations to invert the flow of control of HTTP and put the server back in the driver's seat. Macro packages like htmlgen bring HTML into the language itself, opening up much more than a template system can provide. Meanwhile, object-oriented packages like WebObjects have demonstrated how to decompose the web page into a tree of stateful, interacting objects, allowing a finer granularity of development.
Seaside combines these ideas and others with the rich development environment of Smalltalk to provide a stable, complete, and innovative web application platform. This talk will introduce Seaside, and will focus in particular on the ways in which these abstractions can be leveraged to enable reuse: how to use closures, continuations, and intelligent HTML generation to destroy the intra- and inter-page coupling that is holding web development back.
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