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I'd rather use Seaside for web applications or Ruby on Rails for a web-based interface to a database than use ASP.NET. Seaside is probably the most advanced thing I've seen to date, you should check out the liveWeb project that is built with it, it's gonna blow you away.

I use Seaside with VisualWorks Smalltalk

You'll note their website is a smalltalk web server.

"Why does nobody use it? Fear, uncertainty and doubt. People think it died with AI. People think its old, so it won't be up to modern tasks. People can't get over the parentheses. The boss won't approve it. Nobody else uses it, so it's hard to get support. Any number of reasons."

The intelligence community uses Lisp.

"This doesn't necessarily knock down existing frameworks like Ruby on Rails, which looks pretty sweet, or anything with frameworks."

http://www.beta4.com/seaside2/

I recommend giving this a try.

And since it's now open source, one can have it spit out XUL instead of SWF.

Or we could modify a more powerful web framework to use XUL.

Some would say that any use is inappropriate for PHP. Not me, but it's certainly one of the less interesting open source languages about.

For instance, Ruby's web application support has been rapidly gaining ground for quite a while now; fancy state-keeping systems last seen on LISP; a powerful server framework now integrated with the standard library; an innovative object-relational mapping library which makes interfacing with SQL databases childsplay; an interesting new web application framework which is causing quite a stir; an amazingly easy to set up Wiki server; a nifty template library gaining fancy bytecode based acceleration and native-C compilation. Every one of these projects alone is probably more interesting to the average developer than yet-another-OpenGL-module for an interpreted language... isn't it?

Maybe this is why this is News for Nerds, not News for Geeks ;)

Check out seaside for an even better idea.

The ones I'm most familiar with are extensions of Common Lisp. There are 3 CL web servers, each with dynamic HTML generation capability (AllegroServe, Araneida, CL-HTTP). Then there's Lisp Server Pages, Active Lisp Pages, etc., and another whole load of CGI solutions. I use (and highly recommend) AllegroServe. There is a whole big list over at Cliki (which runs on Araneida).

There are many CGI bindings for various Scheme implementations, and the PLT web server is kind of popular. I'm not very familiar with Scheme web solutions though, so I probably left something out.

There is a lot of activity with Smalltalk-based web apps. Seaside is a continuation-based framework that gets a lot of attention. There's also AIDA/Web, and an unfinished mod.Smalltalk. I am not very familiar with Smalltalk web solutions either, so I probably missed a few.

Python is a very popular option, and Zope seems to be a very popular framework. I don't know anything about web programming in Python aside from that.

Take pretty much any of the recent lightweight (in the conference meaning of the term) languages, and you're bound to find good options, almost all of them better in terms of security and speed than PHP; I can't think of a single one that has a more annoying syntax or more convoluted and limited semantics than PHP, though. Another thing that you should consider is the website we're posting on is pretty interactive, and kind of popular, and it's written in Perl.

You should really take the time to get up to speed on the new stuff if you haven't paid attention since school.

Check out this web-app technology built (first) in squeak, now also available in the descendant to ParcPlace smalltalk (now Cincom Smalltalk)

Also of interest is croquet, a virtual 3d environment. I saw a live demo of this where the presenter (David Smith, one of the engineers) showed his avatar moving between worlds existing one each on two separate machines. It was not fast, but not as slow as you might expect.

Also, smalltalk solutions is next week (in Seattle) so come by if you're interested and available.

P.S. what is now known as Squeak was started at Apple. The Squeak group left Apple during Amelio's reign when the company was gutting it's research depts.

For people who think there must be something better to write web-based applications than PHP, I invite you all to take a look at Seaside by Avi Bryant, a web framework available for Squeak and, I think, VisualWorks Smalltalk. It uses continuations to make programming a web application basically the same as coding a desktop application. It features many, many things that PHP cannot do.

Seaside, a "web application framework" written in Smalltalk uses continuations for things like backtracking. The resulting code is said by some to be cleaner and easier to understand than more conventional approaches. The author's blog has some discussion on the matter. There's also a port of Seaside to Ruby called Borges.

But yea, in general, it's hard to see what good call/cc is. It tends to be one of those features that people bring up in "language x vs y" flamewars, but never actually use in practice.

So when are we going to get the Smalltalk equivalent of JBoss, or JoNaS? The number of "extensions" that Java has is huge.

I've never worked with JBoss or JOnAS specifically, but Squeak has had a few application servers for a while. Seaside is the higher-level app server I've been using, but there are a couple others that implement similar functionality at different levels. Squeak has an very large library of extensions, not as large as Java, but very substantial. Swazoo is another app server for Smalltalk that comes to mind.

Outside of what you can do in Squeak, there are a handful of other application servers for Squeak, including VisualWave for VisualWorks, IBM's WebSphere and GemStone/S. These are hard-core enterprise app servers. Depending on your needs, there's an option.

And when is the graphics going to improve in Squeak? Right now it looks like a cartoon, instead of a serious tool.

Squeak has looked like more than a cartoon for a long time. This is what my Squeak desktop looks like now, save for a for desktop extensions not in the shot. No, it doesn't look like Windows or OS X, but it's far from looking like a cartoon. You can use any IceWM theme with Squeak, and in that screenshot, I choose a BlueCurve look-a-like theme. A project called Zurgle is working towards some UI beautification that goes beyond IceWM/color themes. You can find some screenshots here showing the WinXP Luna and Borg themes.

The graphic system in Squeak itself is quite powerful, regardless if you are displaying actual cartoons or a more boring business-like desktop.

When is Smalltalk going to have their CSPAN equivalent?

CSPAN? I am guessing you mean CPAN, but if you mean something related to television news, let me know.

Squeak has had something called SqueakMap for the last few point releases. It has a similar goal as CPAN, although isn't a clone. It does some things differently. However, when I download a fresh copy of Squeak 3.6, I can open it up, click the menu option for opening the Package Loader, and simply select an application or library and install it. Usually less than a minute later, whatever I downloaded it installed and ready to use. It's a nice system.

When is code doing to be compatiable across VMs?

It already is, to an extent. A lot of the different Smalltalks use different GUI frameworks, and I don't expect any compatability layers to show up anytime soon. But then again, you wouldn't expect code written for SWT to work for Swing and AWT, would you?

When is the documentation going to improve?

This is an ongoing process. This is an area which really needs work, especially for Squeak. The commercial Smalltalks have good documentation already, which makes sense. Luckily, folks have taken this up lately and are working on better tutorials for beginners and trying to improve other documentation.

It may sound crazy to an armchair hater, but it's not the most glamorous thing, writing documentation. People come into the Squeak community, figure things out and want to start writing code. You know, creating new things or improving existing ones. It's not the easiest thing to find folks who want to write docs. It hurts the community in the end, yes, but that doesn't make it any more fun. If Squeak had the budget of Java, a company like Sun throwing literally millions and millions of dolars at it, I imagine it would have documentation of similar quality and quantity. But alas, that's not the case.

For modern approaches, you'll have to look outside of the java box. From the language/devel environment that brings us MVC, there's Seaside. Similar continuation-based approach is used more in the Lisp/Scheme community. On java platform, Coccon Control Flow also uses continuation.

I don't believe there's any book on those yet.