RE: OSCON "contest"

> 
> And if you were invited to a Ruby event and asked whether Seaside/ 
> Magritte could support JavaScript, would you tell them that 
> they were  
> wrong for asking?
> 
> James

Nope, but I wouldn't be showing them Magritte either, that's a mistake, I'd
be showing them Seaside and Scriptaculous.  Magritte is complex in the same
way Glorp is complex, building all those metadata descriptions is complex
and error prone and takes way too much time to use in a demo, especially a
time limited one.  Whipping up something in raw Seaside would be much faster
unless you've rigged up some code generators to write the mappings
automatically for you.  

Rails guys are accustomed to ActiveRecord and scaffolding which bootstraps
them up to a running system very quickly using code generation and a
generate and modify philosophy (this is also how they learn Rails).
Gemstone might eliminate the need for ActiveRecord, but Magritte is not at
all equivalent to scaffolding.  Scaffolding is much easier to hack and
customize because it's not a framework, it's just a bunch of generated form
template code.  To compete against Rails in a time limited demo, you'll need
something like a scaffolder, or a form builder you have a very deep
knowledge of so it can be highly customized on the fly.  To sell newbs, you
need the scaffolder, because scaffolding code is an excellent way to teach
them how to write Seaside code, they don't need yet another framework
(Magritte) to learn.

Ramon Leon
http://onsmalltalk.com