Links - Seaside Hosting Examples
Note: my understanding of these services is evolving and may be incorrect at this point. Updates coming soon probably ...
Of course, the best example of a Seaside-powered site may be the Seaside site itself. But there are several interesting ( and either cheap or free ) hosting sites for Seaside web applications.
The largest is Seaside Host ( seasidehosting.st ). You select a user name and your user directory becomes seasidehosting.st/yourname. You upload the Smalltalk image developed on your local machine with Seaside and you are set to go [ joke ]. Many of the user sites are either non-functional or non-existent ( they chickened out presumably ).
To visit user sites at seasidehosting.com. click Support->Account. Since most of these sites are fairly inactive ( and perhaps because the service is free and probably underpowered as well ), it may take a while for the server to do a first load of the application - then it runs pretty well.. Some of the applications use big images and you will need a fast network connection.
A link to a small but working Pier CMS example ( small images ). Leave a message, say hello.
An even more active example of Pier, from the German Smalltalk User Group ( auf Deutsch ). It seems to run very quickly. Not much on the Jobbörse, however.
The doc.seasidehosting.st site has the standard Seaside examples installed. They really are quite impressive. By selecting tools>>classbrowser, you get the function of an HTML Smalltalk class browser. The left hand panel has package names and if you scroll down to the Seaside/Pier packages, you can see the actual source code running the Seaside server.
The tools>>screenshot function is hard to describe unless you've worked with a Smalltalk UI. Some differences, like drag-and-drop does not work and scrolls bars have limited abilities, but it looks very familiar to a Smalltalker. Click "over" to step over the current instruction in the server VM. It's unique in my experience. What a non-Smalltalk developer would make of it, I'm not sure.
The good people at the newhorizonchurch.seasidehosting.st seem to have a working site ( mostly pass protected fortunately ). The last two items in the main menu are fairly complex entry forms. They have some of the Pier demos installed too.
For the more worldly, there is DonjOnline ( donjonline.seasidehosting.st ) - in French. Beware les monstres and vulgaires employés !
Another hosting site is Seaside Parasol ( seasideparasol.com ) Their approach is different and explaining seasideparasol.com takes a bit more effort. First, you must have your own host site ( for instance, mydomain.com at Hostmonster or where ever ). The seasideparsol folks issue you a subdomain name ( such as parsol_sub ), so that you have a subdomain ( parasol_sub.mydomain.com ) pointing to their server with your user directory. At that point, you develop standard HTML/PHP pages in your user directory. For the Smalltalk pages ( .st suffix ), there is a subdirectory ( /seaside ) containing the Seaside application as a Smalltalk image. Their server redirects .st references to the /seaside directory.
It looks as if seasidehosting.com has Seaside running "in front" of Apache and seasideparasol.com has Seaside running "in back", but I'm not sure of this. I may be confusing apples and oranges. To reiterate, updates soon ?