Abstract

Nowadays, many complex applications are built with a web browser as their main user interface. However, despite the increasing popularity of the web as an application platform, implementing and maintaining web applications still remains difficult and lags behind conventional desktop application development. The underlying technologies such as HTTP for the interaction and XHTML/CSS for the presentation were originally built to display and link static documents. Unfortunately, most mainstream frameworks provide only little abstraction over the page-oriented structure imposed by those technologies. Inevitably, the goto-like manner of how pages are linked leads to spaghetti code and hampers reuse. In this article we present Seaside, a web application framework that provides an uniform and pure object-oriented view on web applications. In this way, Seaside avoids the unwieldily goto-like style. Exploiting the reflective features of Smalltalk, Seaside reintroduces procedure call abstraction in the client-server context. Seaside’s key concepts are: (i) a component architecture supporting multiple, simultaneously active control flows, (ii) a programmatic XHTML generation, and (iii) fully supported on-the-fly debugging, code-editing, and recompilation. In this article we discuss these key features of Seaside and explain how they are made possible by the dynamic nature and the reflective capabilities of Smalltalk.