The Ruby on Rails demo in Seaside

The classic Ruby on Rails demo that usually gets presented is how to build a blog in 15 minutes. This is what you usually get with the RoR screencasts. Ramon Leon at On Smalltalk did a similar demo in his own screencast, “How to build a blog in 15 minutes”, using Smalltalk (Squeak) and Seaside, of course. A key difference between his demo and the one for RoR is he does not save blog entries and comments in a database like MySQL, but rather in OrderedCollections.

I talked to Ramon about using OrderedCollections, and he said that he only uses this scheme for prototypes. It probably would not be safe if it was in production. He suggested people use object database technologies for that, such as Gemstone, Goods, or Magma. Or, if you want to use a relational database, he suggested using Glorp, for object-relational mapping.

Unlike most screencasts, his have no audio, at least right now. It sounds like he’s working on that for future ones.