Seaside

While digging through the archives in my work PC yesterday, I found that I was in possession of VisualWorks 7.1 install files; I promptly installed VW, and as I was sitting there, idly wondering what to do with it, the 'enterprisey' side of me told me I should check out Seaside. I googled for a tutorial, and spent the next half hour going through it. Impressed with what I saw, I resolved to dig deeper, and came home and downloaded Squeak. Mistake; Squeak fonts look crappy in my Linux (OpenSuSE 10.1) box.

I turned my attention to VisualWorks. I managed to run the sample counter application in my browser, but not before some pain: you need the SeasideForWebToolkit parcel to install Seaside. This depends on the WebToolkit parcel, which in turn depends (among others) on the Regex11 and Opentalk-CGI parcels.

While I agree that managing these dependencies is not all that difficult, especially for someone used to Linux package management, a mechanism that automatically downloads and loads these parcels -- a la apt-get -- would definitely have eased the way. This was particularly apparent when I couldn't determine where I could get Regex11 (BTW, I ran into Isaac Gouy's post asking the same question -- hi Isaac); I took a guess (correctly, it turned out) and downloaded the Contributed.tar.gz file.

OK, now when I try to exit VisualWorks, I get a 'Message not understood' for some method called 'clearPageCache'. Not happy.

Update: Tried Squeak again. Fonts don't look that crappy now, for some reason. More importantly, Squeak's package management -- SqueakMap -- is more in line with what I mentioned above. I was able to download and install Seaside and its depedencies with no fuss. Nice.