Of Seaside, Squeak and Dabble DB
Avi Bryant is delivering Dabble DB. He is the developer of Seaside, a continuation server created in Squeak [1].
Dabble DB combines the best of group spreadsheets, custom databases, and intranet web applications into a new way to manage and share information on the web.
Dabble DB is built on Seaside.
It’s a calendar, pivot table and database over the internet.
Invest 7 minutes viewing the video, it is worth it.
[1] Squeak is a modern, open source, highly portable, fast and full-featured implementation of the powerful Smalltalk programming language and environment.
“The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet. Don’t be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas.” - Alan Kay
August 10th, 2006 at 8:03 pm
Ive seen this before, except that the year was 1986 and it was called Borland Reflex. No collaborative aspect, but just like DabbleDB, it was a visual, forms based database, with aspects of a spreadsheet and a desktop publishing tool.
October 10th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
The real point here isn’t that it’s a visual database tool for non-DBers. Of course that’s been done before a long time ago. What’s special about it then? DabbleDB is developed using a continuation based programming idiom on the Seaside platform (on top of Smalltalk). This powerful facility along with other really nice abstractions afforded the developer allows the very rapid development of powerful web applications. The developer does not have to code in terms of sessions, pages, state machines or other artifacts having nothing to do with expressing application concepts. Instead software can be developed without breaking it up into “web programming” pieces that are scattered all over the place. This means you can now spend your energy on developing real value, and not on sacrificing your competive advantage on the altar of satisfying the requirements of your web programming model.