Hi Tom, What you say makes sense at the face of it but when you get into the details... does it really buy you anything?
When you ask a graphics designer to to design something for you they basically do it the way they want to. You can ask for this or that but in the end you will have to put the images somewhere. You will get upset it's not xhtml compliant and tweak the code. You are going to add your "webojects" tags. You are actually going to massage those files in many different ways. It is very rare that you'll get something complete that you can totally plug and play. What is the real difference in taking the time to break out the presentation in HTML / .wod versus doing it in pure programming as in the snippet I showed? Very little. In essence you are paying the designer to give you something that looks good, it is still your job to put it into a dynamic web app. So for roughly equivalent effort to setup your app you then gain the ability to read it easier and refactor it. In the long run it is a big win. This is one of those things you need to try before you discount it. Remember how we used to "pretty print" or "reformat" in the WOBuilder days? Perhaps I'm now showing my age... It was beautiful. I miss that. I can actually do that in Seaside by just asking the syntax to reformat. It's just like you ask Eclipse to auto-indent your java source. -- Aaron From: "Tom M. Blenko" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Cc: WebObjects Mailing List <[email protected]> Date: 09/28/2011 01:21 PM Subject: Re: Finding WO people for startups (cult of the dead) I also prefer .html/.wod model because it's (close to) separating view and controller. I'm accustomed to receiving HTML from someone who, e.g., cuts the page, provides images, puts in pro-forma tags for active elements. The supplier is responsible to deliver a page (he wraps it in a little PHP) that is displayable and tested across browsers (I think he tests against 17 of them). I then insert the active elements, supply JavaScript, etc. I also may receive updates to the page in HTML (in which case I'm doing some kind of diff on HTML and update on HTML/wod). It looks to me as if this process is going to become a lot more work on my side and a lot more error prone if I go to this non-HTML/"single source" approach -- unless I get the HTML supplier to instead give me Seaside. Am I understanding this correctly? Tom On Sep 28, 2011, at 9:38 AM, [email protected] wrote: Hi Chuck, I can feel your gears turning. That's a good thing! 1) PHP is nothing but a template file (with embedded programming) 2) WO has a template file, a programming file, and it also has "in-line" binding which I've never been a fan of. Then there is the OGNL too... 3) Seaside is nothing but programming logic. So PHP is on one side and Seaside is on the other. WO is in the middle. We all can agree that the PHP, JSP, etc. way is a nightmare. You can make good software but you have to work harder. WO way is better. For many years I really liked the way the .html / .wod was nothing but presentation and bindings. OGNL is cool for quick and dirty but it didn't feel right to me being too cluttered like the PHP way and hard to debug. Inline bindings also clutter the HTML file and never resonated with me either. Maybe... perhaps its cool for a WOString with a single value but anything other than that... I'd rather someone use the .wod file. The Apple way was insane, you had to do all inline bindings or none. The WOnder way is best, able to mix the two. In WO there is the minor hassle of finding the line in HTML that matches up with the .wod file. Using WOlips this is easy because it finds it for you and jumps you right there to synchronize the two files in a split view. One thing WOLips can't do is refactor that code. Only Java code is refactorable. You also have to be extremely astute that you output correct and balanced HTML Seaside way is best. By using a living language, everything is immediate, you don't feel the urge to cheat like with OGNL. By removing the template file entirely and using objects you get so many benefits. 1) No extra files to coordinate. 2) no HTML syntax problems. 3) you can refactor ALL of your code, not just the business logic. 4) you can still partition your presentation logic - but instead of putting it in a different file you put it in a method. 5) did I mention everything is alive? There isn't even a source code file to deal with. No compiling, no interpreting static files, no need for an add-on like JavaRebel. In Eclipse you can query for methods given part of a name you remember. In Smalltalk you can query for methods that take such and such parameters and evoke a certain value, you don't even have to know the method name. Smalltalk will immediately give you a handful of methods that do "greatest common denominator" for example. "Living" versus "Living Dead" there is a difference but I digress. Here is an example of how presentation is rendered in Seaside. Bare in mind that "renderContentOn" is akin to "appendToResponse". And that "html" is an object which gets passed into the method that is a bit like a WOContext and a String buffer rolled into one. In this example it is going to render an HTML table with table rows and table data cells: renderContentOn: html html table: [ html tableRow: [ html tableData: [html text: 'Table entry']]; tableRow: [ html tableData: [html text: 'Table entry']]]. Look foreign? Perhaps but it's worth getting your feet wet and kicking these ideas around. I've seen many things and this is the first set of tools and processes that make me feel good. Like it is equivalent and perhaps better than WO. It's brain dead easy to install and there are a number of tutorials out there. -- Aaron From: Chuck Hill <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Cc: WebObjects Mailing List <[email protected]> Date: 09/27/2011 06:02 PM Subject: Re: Finding WO people for startups (cult of the dead) Hi Aaron, On 2011-09-27, at 9:19 AM, [email protected] wrote: > What is cool about Smalltalk / Seaside with respect to WO? > > 5) Even better than "in-line" binding it has no template file what-so-ever by design. All your HTML output is coded in the programming language. No more unbalanced DIV tags. Everything is refactorable. Is that better? In my imagination that makes it like PHP. Would that not obstruct what little view of page structure that is still there in WO? -- Chuck Hill Senior Consultant / VP Development Practical WebObjects - for developers who want to increase their overall knowledge of WebObjects or who are trying to solve specific problems. http://www.global-village.net/products/practical_webobjects _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Webobjects-dev mailing list ([email protected]) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/webobjects-dev/blenko%40martingalesystems.com This email sent to [email protected]
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