Deep SIXX with XMLPullParser

At our company, we develop our GLASS apps in Pharo and then deploy to a GLASS repository on one of our servers, so we sometimes need to copy model objects from one environment to the other. One of our applications also performs regular imports from a third-party database, so we fetch it into a 32-bit Squeak [...]

Mold: Form Validation for Seaside

A long time ago, I asked about systems for form validation that aren’t “model-based”. By “model-based validation”, I mean that the rules for whether a certain sort of input is acceptable are declared in (or attached to) a domain model that the form is operating on. This is the way that ActiveRecord (Rails) and Magritte (Seaside) [...]

Showing a “Session Expired” Notice in Seaside

When a Seaside session expires, many of its links become invalid. Sure, you can use the hooks to make certain URLs bookmarkable, but most URLs are session-specific out of necessity. When you click on one after the session expires, Seaside kicks you back to the starting point for the application with no explanation whatsoever. [...]

Seaside Presentation at 3CLUG

Travis Griggs and I will be giving a Seaside presentation titled “Lay Rails to REST” for the Tri-Cities Linux Users Group this coming Saturday (December 8th, 2007). If you’re in southeastern Washington state and interested in learning more about Seaside, and how it compares to Rails in particular, stop by West 248 at the WSU [...]

One-Field Forms and IE Quirks

I encountered an old quirk in Internet Explorer again — one I hadn’t seen since I was doing most of my web programming in PHP. I had developed a style of PHP (and later Rails) coding that avoided it, but Seaside’s architecture makes you more likely to fall victim.
We often take for granted that the [...]

Meaningful Seaside Links after Session Expiry

There’s something about Seaside’s URLs that has bothered me for a long time, and I just discovered a solution. I haven’t seen anything about this anywhere else, so I figured I’d write it down in case it’s useful to anyone else.
Since your URLs are managed by your Seaside session, they all become invalid when your [...]

Alternatives to Model-Based Validation?

Rails has an decent set of validation rules for its database models. You can specify that particular variables must be present or satisfy certain constraints, either by themselves (“must be two characters long”) or in relation to each other (“password can’t be blank for administrators”). I’ve written several of my own extensions to these for [...]

My Full-Circle Journey Back to Smalltalk

I suppose it’s time to tell my story. I was a Smalltalk zealot in the late 90’s, but I left it behind when I started my own business. I’ve now come full-circle, and I’m finding once again that Smalltalk is the best tool for most of the programming work I do.
I learned Smalltalk programming from [...]