Just a short extension to Lawsons mail. It depends what you need to do. Pier is a system based on Magritte and Seaside. And that is reflected in the object hierarchie. To be able to do just a web component you need to subclass WAComponent. This component has just a dependency on seaside and can be run without pier. If you subclass MAComponent you can make use of Magritte related stuff. But then you also need Magritte to able to run your component. And finally PRWidget eases your use in a pier environment. And again pier is your dependency then. So if you only want to display a text box and a list that you define yourself than you should subclass WAComponent. hope this helps,