Seaside vs. Traditional

Two recent comments in the Squeak mailing-list on Seaside vs. traditional web frameworks state:

As a new Smalltalker, I couldn't understand Seaside. I think that Aida is a lot easier to use and learn.

I've experienced this many times while giving dozens of tutorials on Seaside. There are always some people that have a very hard time to get their head around Seaside, mostly because they think in terms of traditional web frameworks.

On the other hand, Seaside is amazingly simple for people without much prior web development experience. Seaside is just like they imagine the web to be: They define callbacks, they define flow, they compose and reuse widgets. They don't worry about low level details such as request parsing, response generation, URL creation, finding unique IDs, etc. It all feels very natural to them. I often hear, that it is even simpler than building a native user-interface.

That's one of the reasons why Seaside is called a heretic web framework. The web is moving. We believe in the benefit of our non-traditional approach.