Re: OSCON "contest"

On Jul 24, 2008, at 5:54 PM, Ramon Leon wrote:

>>
>> 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.

I did try it both ways and building the editor by hand seemed to be  
more lines of code and I thought I'd go for something that might seem  
more familiar for the domain definition. Also, since I was building  
one component by hand trying the other as meta data seemed like  
reasonable variety. On the other hand, since I don't consider the  
whole experience a great success I certainly won't insist that I made  
the right choice.

> 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.

Agreed. Maybe next time I'll channel the better-known "James" and try  
a demo of Web Velocity!

> Ramon Leon
> http://onsmalltalk.com

James Foster