Opposable Thumbs

Darren Hobbs looks at Seaside and asks, "can your rails do this?" (More info on this Seaside functionality here.) To which I respond, why not? Of course, Rails doesn't use a component based approach (though it has been MUCH discussed ), but I don't see why it couldn't be extend to allow editing of the source. The only trick would be to figure out which files had been used in making up the current page. I wouldn't think this would be too hard. Either instrument Rails to annotate the session along the way with the layout, view, etc. used along the way of rendering the view or use introspection to figure out yourself (this would obviously be the less intrusive approach, but would also be subject to breakage if some of the core flow were to change). Of course, this image looks a good bit like a standard IDE class browsed, which brings to mind the idea of just pulling in all of your classes.