Building advanced web applications is notoriously hard and complex.
The current state of the art is a modified version of the model-view-controller paradigm, implemented with some kind of server pages, web actions and an object model. But even using the best framework in an advanced environment, there are some major problems.
The request-response cycle of HTTP remains visible, the statelessness of HTTP requires often complex session management, form processing remains an annoying, repetitive task and there is no such thing as components that can be combined freely.
Enter Seaside, a Web Application Framework for Squeak Smalltalk. In this article we describe our first experiences exploring this framework. First we tried a very simple web application to compute factorials. Next we did something harder: we implemented a simple calculator as a web application. We were absolutely amazed at how easy it was: much, much easier than it would be in any other framework that we know of. We believe Seaside offers a dramatic improvement in abstraction and productivity.