Do you recommend VisualWorks for seaside development? Or VA? Or?
I thought I remember seeing discussion about Cincom's committment to webvelocity and/or seaside? I thought they were moving away from webvelocity ? Does anyone know if they are they still putting effort into seaside?
Though Cincom's VisualWorks and Instantiation's VAST (formerly IBM VisualAge Smalltalk) are great environments, you should check their licensing and pricing.
VAST is putting a lot of effort into having everything working and up to date, on one of the most robust Smalltalks that ever existed. VisualWorks has a long history of commitment and enterprise presence.
However I would recommend the use of Pharo Smalltalk, which is the Smalltalk dialect on which the Seaside platform is developed and then ported to other dialects. And it is one of the Smalltalks that is moving forward faster these days.
You could also consider the use of GLASS, the Gemstone Smalltalk implementation of Seaside, which is backed by the powerful Gemstone/S active object database.
I recommend you start first with Pharo, and then if it is needed you could migrate to GLASS.
Regards,