Seaside 3.0 and Documentation

For those who aren't at ESUG this year and missed Lukas' tweet, we announced yesterday that the Seaside 2.9 alpha series will become Seaside 3.0 when we go to beta.

We feel the name is well earned: a cleaner architecture, increased flexibility, better documentation, improved portability, and jQuery support make Seaside 3.0 an even more solid base for developing powerful web applications. They also lead the way for more incremental changes in the future and should make life easier for anybody who wants to develop tools or other frameworks on top of Seaside.

We will be running a Seaside Sprint here in Brest from Friday afternoon through Saturday and the goal is to get the remaining issues resolved for a first beta release. Please join us if you have the opportunity.

Also announced at ESUG, was the release of the online book Dynamic Web Development with Seaside. It's a great resource: make sure to check it out and contribute comments and content.

ESUG and Keychain integration for Firefox

I arrived this afternoon in Brest, France for the ESUG 2009 conference. I didn't write much Smalltalk but got caught up with a few people and had a couple of interesting discussions.

There will be much Seaside to come but, taking a break from that over the past few days, I also managed to get a beta version released of my Keychain Services Integration extension for Firefox that allows OS X users to store their logins and passwords in Apple's keychain. This allows the passwords to be shared with other browsers like Safari and Camino and also lets you take advantage of features like Keychain locking to protect your stored passwords. If you use Firefox 3.x on OS X, give it a try and let me know how it goes - it's scratching an itch for me anyway.

Through the eyes of a child

On a whim, while walking in London yesterday, I popped into the Tate Modern gallery. I'm not a huge modern art fan, but a few pieces caught my attention. Two of the most interesting were No Title (Table and Four Chairs) and Red Room, which I've just discovered are both by Robert Therrien.

Red Room is, as the title suggests, a room where every single object (except the single white light bulb in the ceiling) is practically the same shade of red. The room is packed with stuff and it's surprisingly compelling to look at. The collection of objects screams that there's some hidden story here waiting to be deciphered.

No Title (Table and Four Chairs) is a large scale (3.5 times normal) dining table and four chairs. On first glance, I thought, "ok, a big table". But the more I studied it, the more I was almost unable to walk out of the room. I began to contemplate the effect of looking up at the underside of a table, of standing barely higher than the seat of a chair. Obviously, as children, we all saw the world from exactly this position, but I found the situation almost impossible to fathom, let alone to recall. Very interesting.

Check out photos of both or if you're in London drop by the gallery and see them for yourself.

Web Velocity released

Big news from Cincom on the Seaside mailing list today: they've made an evaluation version of their commercial Seaside-based Web Velocity environment available for download. In case you've missed the buzz, Web Velocity takes Seaside running in VisualWorks Smalltalk, adds ActiveRecord integration and a web-based development environment (written in Seaside, of course). If you're curious, head over and download a copy.

London

I'll be in London (UK) on Wednesday June 24 for 10 days or so. If anyone around there wants to meet up for a beer and talk Seaside, Smalltalk, or something else, send me an email or add a comment. Or if there are any good tech meetups during that time I'd be happy for a pointer.

Seaside 2.9 on VisualWorks

Good news from Cincom: it seems they have Seaside 2.9 ported to VisualWorks with all tests passing. They didn't start very long ago and I haven't heard the sounds of much struggling coming from that direction so it seems like porting wasn't too difficult. I'll give myself and the rest of the development team a pat on the back for that one!

Meanwhile, we're eyeing another alpha release and trying to stare down a few remaining rough edges that are preventing a reasonable attempt at a beta. If anyone feels like tackling an improved set of configuration/administration/development tools, let us know!

BC-STV

I am becoming increasingly fed up with the fear-mongering and misleading statistics being used by the campaign against the BC-STV electoral system being voted on next week in British Columbia.

I'm voting yes to STV for one very simple reason: it removes the fear of vote splitting, allowing me to indicate my true preferences. Period.

Have you ever heard any of the following statements?

• "This is an NDP riding, there's no point even voting for someone else."
• "This could be a close battle. Voting for the Green party might help the Liberal party get in."
• "I like this party but I don't like their candidate in my riding."

With STV, you'll never have to hear those again. You can indicate your true first preference and, if they don't get elected, your vote gets counted for your next choice. No more vote splitting. And voting is dead simple: you write a "1" next to your first preference, a "2" next to your second preference, and so on.

Any electoral system is a complex balance between individual and group freedoms, degree of proportionality, cost, and many other factors. There is no "perfect" system. BC-STV may get tweaked over time but, in the meantime, the freedom to vote the way I want is reason enough to support it.

It's a shame that our province doesn't seem able to manage a real debate about this significant and important issue but don't be fooled by the mudslinging from either side. If you find the pro and con sites for STV in BC a little too heated, the Wikipedia articles on STV and FPTP (as well as on other voting systems) at least list both pros and cons for each. I also found the website of the Electoral Reform Society in the UK had useful and interesting reading (including pros and cons) on many different electoral systems. Although their stated preference for STV may bias their assessments of other systems, the site is much more balanced than any of the BC sites.