memerocket asks when a full blown IDE will be delivered in a browser:

Smalltalk's browser paradigm will not be bound to an aesthetically-impaired user interface technology. Like Crichton's Raptor, it has found a way out. It has broken free into the (web) browser. For now, this has resulted only in a marginal usability improvement — LiveWeb has about the same Aesthetics as Squeak's browser. But how long will it be before LiveWeb gets its face lift? If Avi Bryant and friends can create a web application as visually striking as dabbledb, it's only a matter of time before they, or someone else applies the same level of care to LiveWeb.

How long will it be before a complete IDE is delivered as a web application? To varying degrees, Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA are stuck on the same island that Smalltalk was. They're all trying to be graphically rich and run on many platforms. They're all expending lots of resources maintaining UI toolkits (think of Eclipse's Rich Client Platform ). And the resultant UI technology, while often innovative and sometimes pleasing, suffers a “credibility gap” when compared with platform-specific technology on the Mac or Windows. When will the IDE's throw their weight behind the DHTML+AJAX crowd and embrace the “third platform”?

Well, there are still - even with help from Ajax - fairly severe restrictions on the level of usability you get from a browser. As well, I'm not sure I want to be debugging over the wire regularly - it's cool for a test server environment (or even for a deployed server) - but I'd rather have direct access for normal use, thanks - dropped network connections can just ruin your entire day.

Having said that, the tools that Seaside ships with are very cool, and make for a heck of a demo of Smalltalk's capabilities. Which you can find in Cincom Smalltalk, btw - there's a Seaside port to our VisualWorks environment.