Search code examples
smalltalkseaside

Is Seaside still a valid option?

Seaside just released a release candidate for the upcoming 3.0 version, so it appeared on my radar again. As I'm currently pondering what web framework to use for a future project, I wonder whether it's something to consider. Alas, most of the publicity for Seaside is from '07, which is probably one or two generations for the web. So I'm hoping that the community here can answer some questions

  1. Continuation-based frameworks were pretty great when most of your workflow was mostly in HTML, e.g. form submits. For today's JavaScript-heavy environments, that hardly seems worthwhile anymore.

  2. Is Squeak able to handle a reasonable workload? From other questions here and elsewhere, it seems that for proper scaling another implementation (Gemstone etc.) would probably fare better in the long run, but I don't have a proper idea how far away that is. Sessions seem to be rather expensive.

  3. I know that comparisons are hard, but most of the articles you find on the net set Seaside and Rails side by side. How would combinations like Scala/Lift, Clojure/Compojure or Erlang/Nitrogen do instead?

Solution

  • I have answers to question one and two:

    1. This is true. However since version 2.8 Seaside is not a strictly "continuation-based" framework anymore. Seaside uses continuations in the flow module only. Since Seaside 3.0 the flow module is even optional. Also note that Seaside has strong Javascript support since 2005, this is long before mainstream frameworks started to add Javascript functionality. Today Seaside comes with JQuery and JQueryUI support built-in.
    2. Of course that depends on what you store within your session objects, but typically sessions are small (less than 20 KiB). Use the memory profiler in your application to determine the exact memory consumption.