Well, there are plenty of really neat ways to produce web applications. Most of you (like me) will work with php, mysql and probably enrich those with new AJAX features using one the available libraries like rico, SAJAX or script.aculo.us. Well, there is yet another way. Some of you may have heard about Smalltalk and/or are using it. It’s a nice language and at the company I work everybody is using it or, to be more precise, we do most of our stuff in Squeak, which is build and run with smalltalk.
I’ve not worked with this so far but now I’m trying to introduce myself to Seaside, which is essentially a web application framework for Squeak.
The main difference between the usual way you do web apps is that in Squeak (and therefore Seaside) every part of the app is an object (Seaside: Component) and you give each object the methods they need to work within the big picture.
It does some amazing things and it includes script.aculo.us, so you can actually have up-to-date interfaces in your apps. I’ m just in the learning process so I’ll write about that again in the near future when I have a better grasp of it.
Another thing: As some of you may already have read Firefox 2.0 is out. Which doesn’t mean it was released because up to now it hasn’t but it should be qutie soon (next few hours). If you don’t know what happened you might want to take a look around but essentially the files were put on the servers yesterday and there has been no official announcement yet. However, to me it seems that Mozilla is looking for some cheap advertisement, the competition with IE is obvious. But neither do I think they put the files up that early by accident nor did they really believe that nobody would realize and blog it or spread the news until they give green lights. Obviously viral marketing worked pretty good since firefox is amongst the most blogged subjects according to technorati and I wouldn’t be too surprised if Firefox 2.0 would reach new highscores in downloads.
I’ve had a look at it and personally think that I don’t update too soon because some updates to beloved extensions are still missing. Just to be clear about that: If you still use IE for any reason -presumingly laziness- I recommend you to go and www.getfirefox.com asap! Everybody else: Feel free to browse on. 😉