(This is a little overdue, but it’s been a crazy couple of weeks.)

I enjoyed reading Avi Bryant’s blog a few weeks ago about Mind Camp. He was delighted about getting a great compliment for Seaside from one of the Rails faithful: “I defy anyone to come up here and use any other framework to duplicate what we’re doing in Rails as quickly. Except Avi.”

That is certainly a great plug for Seaside, and well deserved. But Avi’s delight itself pays a great compliment to Rails; “Could anyone ask for a better plug?” asks Avi, and indeed praise from the Rails camp for another web framework is high praise.

Thinking of that reminded me of a few weeks prior, when I attended the Smalltalk BOF at OOPSLA. A Smalltalk newbie was there, and asked if Smalltalk had anything like Rails. There were snickers, and a few snide-ish responses of “better than Rails.”

I kept my mouth shut at the time, because it’s rude to show up to someone else’s party and upbraid them. But I think the question of whether Seaside or Rails is “better” is very much open for debate, and heavily dependent on your particular situation. (Disclaimer: I’m doing Rails work right now, but I’m a vocal fan of Seaside and have been introducing people to it in talks at NFJS symposiums for the past 14 months or so.)

Which brings me to the other incident Avi’s blog reminded me of. In early October, Daniel Steinberg sent me a note asking for “the 30-second reason someone would use Seaside and someone would use Rails.” Here’s what I wrote in response:

Seaside is much more advanced but not so mature. It contains core features that are well beyond what Rails can do, and those features attack some of the most difficult aspects of web development. Rails, on the other hand, has many, many more features that attack most of the many, many tedious and mundane aspects of web development [and some of the surrounding issues like packaging and deployment, database access, and testing], and it’s well documented, widely understood, and well supported.

So unless you are really comfortable with Smalltalk and/or are doing some very ambitious things with stateful web applications and complex control flow, choose Rails.

That’s overly simplistic, of course, but that’s what you get in 30 seconds. :-)

Oversimplified as it is, I think it’s a good summary. Seaside was starting to get some buzz at one point, and then Rails came along and (it seems to me) stole most of it, and I think there’s a reason for that. The reason isn’t that Rails is better – it is better in some ways, but Seaside is better in other ways. I think it’s just that Rails’ strengths address problems that are particularly frustrating to developers right now.

But there’s a funny thing about pain: when your worst pain goes away, it doesn’t take long to start being annoyed by the next worst. So it won’t be all that long before Seaside’s particular strengths start to look really attractive to developers who’ve grown accustomed to Rails’ niceties. And then it’ll be time for Seaside (or possibly some other continuation-based web framework inspired by it) to get the buzz again.

There are things Rails can learn from Seaside, certainly, but there are also thing Seaside can learn from Rails, and that learning will probably happen in both directions. As Avi pointed out in another blog this week, Smalltalk and Ruby are much more similar than they are different, so I see the two frameworks complementing (and, as above, complimenting) each other for some time to come.