Creating some sort of data bus

How might I get the various Seaside components to know about their underlying models?

I am trying to build a simple application - sort of a discussion forum. There could be several fora, plus a collection of users - each of whom needs to authenticate. What I am trying to get straight is the easiest/best/most reuseable etc., way of linking the presentation with the data.

Clearly, when I instantiate components, I could pass them the address of the model - or just the subpart of the model they will be interested in, but somehow that feels clunky to me.

As I was sitting here, thinking about it, it suddenly occurred to me that I could identify the shared objects, e.g., user directory etc, and declare them as Global variables in the Smalltalk SystemDictionary. That way, they would be naturally accessible to all components. But, is this a good idea? Aren't Global variables evil?

I don't know, but it does seem to be a neat solution, that builds on top of Smalltalk's 'natural' behaviour, and means that the objects can initialize themselves.

I am going to have a play with the design and see how it pans out.