Proposal: Move SeasideByExample chapter to Enterprise Pharo: A Web Perspective

[dmitrizagidulin]

Extracting the "where to put this chapter?" discussion from issue #126.

(Side-note: the Dynamic Web Development With Seaside book now has its own repo, and is in the process of being converted to Pillar).

Arguments so far:
@kilon - Votes for removal of chapter (although is ok with keeping it).

I vote for the complete removal of that chapter for several reasons

• It's not a beginner oriented chapter as is the focus of this book
• it's not general purpose as is the focus of this book
• It already has its own book and its own documentation which can easily refer to.

@Ducasse - Please keep this chapter. It is stable and this is nice to get started with seaside in one chapter and seaside is stable. It also shows right in the beginner guide that we can do sexy web app with Pharo.

@DamienCassou - I agree with @Ducasse, the Seaside chapter is a nice one to have in a beginners book.

@dmitrizagidulin - Strongly feel that we need to move this chapter to Enterprise Pharo: A Web Perspective. Specifically:

I still think we have these chapters backwards. Consider:
In Pharo By Example, which is a beginner level book, we interrupt our discussion of the actual Pharo language and launch into a description of a particular high-level web development framework (Seaside).

But in Enterprise Pharo: A Web Perspective, which is a book about web frameworks, we don't talk about the Seaside framework, but instead do talk about very beginner-level topics like Zinc Client, which answers the basic question of "how do I retrieve some text from a web url using Pharo".

Why do we feel that beginners should learn how to create heavy weight web applications before they can even do an HTTP GET with Pharo? Or before they can serve the simplest HTTP API call?

Ask yourself this, too - does any other beginner programming language book do this? Do Ruby books stop for a full blown discussion on Ruby on Rails? No, at best they mention how to retrieve stuff with an HTTP client. Do Python books that are teaching people the language introduce the Django web framework? No. And so on.

(On a similar subject, why do we feel that simple File I/O is an advanced topic (which we leave to Chapter 3 of Deep Into Pharo but, again, full blown web app development is beginner?)
(And why are Regular Expressions included in PBE, when they're also featured as a chapter in Deep Into Pharo?)

I strongly believe that we need to move the Zinc Client and File I/O chapters into UPBE, and the Seaside and Regular Expression chapters out of it. In order of importance:

1. Move the Zinc HTTP Client chapter from Enterprise to UPBE (issue Proposal: Add a basic HTTP Client chapter to UPBE #136). And move Files with FileSystem from DeepIntoPharo into UBPE (this is now issue Proposal: Add a File I/O chapter (from vol 2) to UPBE #135). Currently, a reader who finishes PBE has a programming language with no way to get data in or out of it! They can't do the most basic operations -- read some lines from a data file, or from a web API.
2. Move the Seaside chapter to Enterprise Pharo: A Web Perspective. Since that book is, specifically, about web frameworks!
3. Remove the RegularExpression chapter from UPBE. This chapter already exists in Deep Into Pharo. (Or, at very least, remove it from Deep Into Pharo. No reason to have a duplicate chapter). (This is now issue RegularExpressions chapter exists in both UPBE and DeepIntoPharo #134).

[kilon]

I am in complete agreement with you , the sad truth about UPBE is that it has more info about web dev which is not begineer orientated than GUI development which is begineer orientated.

But I wont fight on this, the important thing is that we keep things up to date and if people who want this chapter kept also assume the responsibility of keeping it up to date , thats fine. But to say Seaside chapter is so important for UPBE and then not maintain it is kinda ironic.

For example this is the official Python tutorial

https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/index.html

I dont even ever remember reading a Language tutorial/book that mentioned web development, PBE is the first and I know Basic, Dbase , cliper , C++ , Assembly , C , Java , C# , Delphi and Python

So if people who want to keep it also maintain it, I am perfectly fine with this. But no I dont agree that it should stay in, it does not fit the role of this book, sorry.