Over the last few years, some best practices have come to be widely accepted in the web development world: share as little state as possible; use clean, carefully chosen, and meaningful URLs; use templates to separate your model from your presentation.

Seaside, the engine behind Dabble DB, is a web application framework that breaks all of these rules and then some. Think of it as an experiment in tradeoffs: if you reject the conventional wisdoms of web development, what benefits can you get in return? Quite a lot, it turns out, and this "experiment" has been described by some as the future of web applications -- and by others as "voodoo magic."

In this tutorial, learn the design choices behind the voodoo, and how you can coax Seaside's magic out of any modern dynamic language. This will be a fast-paced, interactive, and code-heavy session: come prepared to build a mini Seaside-style framework in Ruby, Python, Perl, Javascript, or your language of choice.