Camp Smalltalk results

We looked at the Seaside version of SmallWiki and decided it did not work well enough. We were adding security features. Since security depends on Actions, and since the Seaside version didn't have Actions, it seemed like it would not be a good base for work. Links don't work. I imagine lots of other things wouldn't work, but that was enough to persuade me to keep working with the older version. The main problem with the old version is that Actions are a mixture of Commands (a model idea) and GUI. We tried for several days to treat Actions like real Commands and to write them out to a log, but we eventually gave up on that and instead used the Storage system to create a log. I know several things wrong with our current implementation, but we can fix them with enough work. Life would have been much easier if Actions had been only commands and we could have written them to a log and then restored them to recover the log. However, the use of callbacks made that impossible. Callbacks are probably not as bad as I claimed a few days ago. We were trying to do things with Actions that they were not designed to do. However, it is often hard to tell what a framework can do. Normally it is possible to write Commands to a log. It is not possible to write Actions to a log if you intend to execute them after you read them back. We added persistence to SmallWiki by having each page-change write to a log. You can recover from a crash by restarting the latest image and reading the log. We also added a VirtualFolder that allows one user to access a set of pages with a particular name that are in other users folders. I plan to use this in a course I teach. We wrote some actions that will help administer these classes. There are a few more things that need to be done before SmallWiki can replace our WikiWorks server, but we are getting close, and I understand it much better now. Actions are very important. I don't understand why the Seaside version doesn't have it. Probably it is just because it is incomplete. It is a mistake to make page and folder be the same. How can you make new pages without using the component editor? New pages on a page should be in the same folder, new pages on a folder should be inside that folder. What would you do if there were no difference between pages and folders? Seaside will make Actions simpler. However, it is possible to make Actions simpler without Seaside. Callbacks should assign values ONLY to instance variables of Actions. Once the Action is complete, it should be "completed". This would make the behavior of each action easy to understand. They could also be used in logs. It might even be easy to refactor them to be like this. I might look at it next week. -Ralph