21 Jul
2004
21 Jul
'04
11:44 p.m.
Hi ralph
Are you talking about the old SmallWiki (one) or the new one with
Seaside?
Because I can understand that the old one may be difficult to
understand since lukas
tried to minic seaside wtihout seaside. But now when you read the code
of the store shop provided
as an example for seaside I do not understand how callbacks would make
code difficult to read.
When I see the complexity of the code and compare with the one of
seaside, I'm puzzled.
So can you clarify that point?
Thanks
On 21 juil. 04, at 23:05, Ralph Johnson wrote:
In my opinion
callbacks are great. They make a huge improvement of the
abstraction over the dumb and error prone HTTP-protocol: basically
they
remove all the manual handling of request and response fields.
Callbacks make your system impossible to understand. Half a dozen
experienced Smalltalkers have been banging our heads against the
callbacks
for three days.
We are trying to find out when to commit an action, and what arguments
the
action used. Because the request is handled automatically, it is hard
(it
may be impossible) to intercept the request. Because the callbacks in
an
action are executed multiple times, it is hard to tell when something
important it happening.
You are falling into the fallacy that shorter code makes for a simpler
system. Callbacks might be easy for you to write, but they are hard
for
everybody else to read, and in the long run are a bad idea.
I would MUCH prefer a completely manual handling of request and
response
fields.
-Ralph Johnson