Walking on the Seaside

So, after doing some more research today, I'm about 90% sure I'm going to go with Seaside for my framework of choice for this little hobby project. I'm going to take a few days to work with it and see how it goes first, but so far I like what I've seen and read about it. Some things I'd like to find are a couple of public apps (besides Dabble, which is still in closed beta) that use Seaside, and a host that supports it. I could do the hosting myself, but that's really more trouble than I want to go to for a learning experiment.

To sum up the reasons I want to go with Seaside:

1. It's really different from anything I already know. I spend 8+ hours a day using C# and Visual Studio, and I really want to use something dramatically different.
2. Rails is great, but I find myself being more attracted to the smaller, equally active Smalltalk/Seaside community.
   
3. Our past is our future. At PDC I was struck by how many of the "new" features in C# are old features from Smalltalk and Lisp. I want to look ahead at what's likely to be coming in the mainstream languages over the next decade.

If I were developing this as a business app, and time were of the essence, I'd almost certainly go with Ruby on Rails, since I already have a head start in it. Since this is intended for just for my own enjoyment and edification, though, I might as well learn something new along the way.

So, after a little reassurance, I've got Squeak and VisualWorks on my Mac and PC, and I'll be exploring the shoreline over the next week or so.

In other news, my wife now has a blog of her own. Hopefully she won't say anything that's any more embarrassing about me than I've said about her. :-)