I've been working on the next release of Seaside. The most fun new feature has been one inspired by the "halos" used in Squeak's Morphic UI framework: middle click on any UI element in Squeak and a series of icons will surround it that let you rotate it, resize it, copy, inspect, and so on. So I've added a "toggle halos" link to Seaside's toolbar: here's the sushiNet example application with and without halos. Each UI component gets surrounded by a thin grey line, and there's a header at the top that gives the class name for the component and a set of icons. Each icon pops up a new window that lets you inspect or edit the component in some way: for example, the wrench pops up a web-based code browser, and the eye pops up a web-based object inspector. My favorite so far is the pen, which pops up an editor for the CSS stylesheet associated with that component, and refreshes the original page whenever you make changes. The idea here is that a designer could test out the live application, and whenever they see something they want to tweak, they bring up halos and edit the look in place. I have plans to do similar things for localized text and so on.
To echo some recent comments about Smalltalk IDEs: what was especially fun about adding this was how trivial it was to do. Once the infrastructure's in place to let you deal with a web UI as a persistent object graph, everything else is gravy (continuations don't hurt, but they didn't make much difference in this particular case).
In case anyone was wondering: you can still use the app just fine with halos turned on; all the links, forms, etc still work as normal. It can be very educational to leave them on and take a tour through an example application. I'm curious what other kinds of information (call stacks of active continuations?) might be useful to show.
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