Don't stop at Rails, check out Seaside!

In order to develop web apps, I have struggled with Java/Tomcat/Struts for several years. Then there was Ruby on Rails and I thought: wow, what a framework, it can't get any easier... I was wrong. There's Seaside. Seaside is a Smalltalk based web application framework. Take Rails, remove routing and request/response handling, start thinking in object oriented components and let's change the way we think of developing web apps. Welcome to the seaside. And the best thing is: if you have mastered Ruby on Rails, it's quite easy to get into Seaside.

Here are some resources to start with:

• Squeak by example (a free book introducing Smalltalk/Squeak)
• The Seaside homepage
  
• Seaside Tutorial (by the Hasso Plattner Institute)
• Lukas Renggli's Website (one of the core developers of seaside)

Once you have got rid of your resistance against the Smalltalk syntax and the somewhat weird looking windows of Squeak you will be amazed how easy it is to develop web apps with Seaside. I will still be working with Ruby on Rails most of my time but Seaside definitely got my attention.