Last Thursday Philippe and I met to finally push the development of Seaside 2.9. Up to that day, there were only some random commits and we decided that we need to meet in person to get the whole thing started. Contrary to popular belief we neither live nor work at the same place.
We started out the day discussing the new package structure for Seaside 2.9, with the goal to make Seaside modular. If you loaded Seaside 2.8 or earlier you always got everything: the core framework, the development tools, the examples and all the test code. For deployed code this is less than ideal. Also porting to other Smalltalk dialects was cumbersome and relied on strange naming conventions. From now on platform dependent code is in its own package and porters will have a much easier life.
Splitting huge monolithic code into packages is a difficult task. Luckily our knowledge of the code base and the Smalltalk reflection helped us quite a bit to identify and resolve most issues quickly. The package structure is not final, but it is getting better from day to day ...
For the rest of the day (until late at night) Philippe and I worked on the following things (while not forgetting to eat some pasta from time to time):
- Fixed encoding issues of
WAListenerand the Comet package. - Splitting Scriptaculous into multiple sub-packages, adding and styling some new example components.
- Trying to get rid (without success) of an ugly dependency between
WAComponent(Core Library) andWAHalo(Development Tools).