Lukas Renggli is up again, this time talking about Seaside and how it fits with the "Web 2.0" meme. So Seaside does a lot of things out of the box: XHTML CSS RSS AJAX

Heh. He said I'd get on their case for bad RSS. Lol :)

This talk is about Seaside's use of AJAX, which gives you client level interactivity.

You want to concentrate on your web app, not on browser issues (especially browser incompatibilities). Seaside masks that by using Javascript [ed: Depending on how well your browser handles Javascript: see TinyMCE, for instance...].

The integration is via the Scriptaculous Javascript library. It handles things like drag and drop, in place editing, etc. The important thing is, you can express all of this in Smalltalk - Seaside has APIs for that.

Here's a small example of something interesting: shared state across multiple browser instances:

Example:

 
 

html effect
	id: 'hint';
	shake.

becomes:

new Effect.Shake('hint');

You integrate this the same way we saw in the short example 2 days ago.

The kind of code you can write:

 

html (updater | periodical | request | evaluator)
	[OPTIONS]; *
	[HANDLER]; *
	[TRIGGER]; *
	[CALLBACK]; *

Note: I don't guarantee that the code examples are perfect :)

 

"in place editor"
html span
	script: (html inPlaceEditor
	       triggerInPlaceEditor: [:v | anItem title];
	       callback: [:r | r render: anItem];
	with: anItem title.

"drag & drop"
html form id: 'checkboxes'; with: [
html div
	id: 'items';
	script: (html sortable
	       tag: 'div';
	       onUpdate: (html request
	               triggerSortable: 'items'
	               callback: [:v | self model item: v]));
	class: 'items';
	with: [self renderItemsOn: html]]

For debugging, you can usually debug in the Smalltalk debugger. If you have issues at the Javascript level, use Firefox and the FireBug extension that gives you some Javascript debugging capability. And see scriptaculous.seasidehosting.st.

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