Lazycoder

Seaside development

Ted Leung on the air : Phear Avi and Smalltalk: “Best quote I’ve heard from a Seattle Mind Camp roundup:

my favorite was from Ryan Davis, giving a presentation on Rails, who said something like

I defy anyone to come up here and use any other framework to duplicate what we%u2019re doing in Rails as quickly. Except Avi.”

(Via Ted Leung.)

I was at the RoR presentation at MindCamp. That quote caused me to download Squeak and Seaside to see what the fuss is all about. I”m not used to working in a VM like environment so I’m not sure where to start. The Squeak/Smalltalk documentation out there tells you a lot about Smalltalk syntax, but nothing about the environment. The Seaside movies are really useless. All they show is something clicking a “do it” menu item and then opening a browser window, showing a counter var increasing. How about showing me how to GET to that point folks? There’s a 46 MB video, maybe that’ll have more meat in it. So far, most of the Squeak/Smalltalk docs I’ve found are either pure syntax, pages and pages of variable assignment examples, or are propaganda. I think I’ve figured out why people aren’t using Smalltalk as much as they used to. It’s hard when you are starting from square one to get into it. I have yet to find a “beginning Smalltalk” site as good as the ASP.NET site or the Java tutorials. Maybe I’m just too used to being spoon-fed my information?

Update: Avi of “Except Avi” in the quote above, left a tutorial link in the comments. The tutorial is good because it explains the “counter” tutorial that I mentioned above. For me, it showed me what I know and what I don’t know. For example I understand the session id in the querystring and I understand how they are building the page now. What I don’t know is how to structure Smalltalk programs and how to define classes, relationships, and so on. At least I’ve got a starting point now! Looks like fun!