Page 3 - New web language...?

The SWF spec has been publicly available for around 10 years, that's why you get various 3rd party SWF file producers out there like Ming and SWiSH. The wiki page on it covers that in more detail. The gist of it is that anyone can sign up and get the spec to develop SWF producing applications. The actual Flash Player is closed source although personally I don't care about that since it does everything I need it to out of the box and it's free.

I think having things abstracted from each other as is the current state of affairs works quite well. Writing clean compliant HTML pages is beyond alot of my clients who tend to fall back on WYSIWYG editors. That means I put the pages together. Even once it's all laid out nicely they still have a hard time following it. On the other hand they do get the simple layout and workings of a CSS file.

Just this morning one of them rang me up asking how it was all styled. Using Joomla they thought they had to do all the styling manually for each and every page via the admin interface. I told them it was all via a single CSS file in x directory. They headed over there and straight away edited all the default tags to suit their liking in around 5 minutes.

I guess you could do that using a single language, say by having a complex class file and then a much more cut down file that uses the same syntax but is primarily just used for setting properties.

Thinking about it; even most current languages don't just employ a single coding style. C# and JSP apps tend to rely on XML for alot of their underlying values, then there's the resource file types and the make files etc.

I don't think you'll ever have a single language/system that suits everyone's needs and desires, that's an age old issue beyond computing:


Edit:

Adobe have just changed the license for the SWF format as part of their Open Screen Project. Now anyone can make their own SWF player.

While it's not perfect (and probably quite a bit slower for a signficant count of loops), you can sometimes make it slightly more readable using range and foreach:But then again the for-loop method shows explicitly that you're starting at 0 and doing 20 loops (probably an array of 20 items or similar). I guess once you're used to it from C/C++-style languages, the brain can easily parse the expressions from it and know what's going on. Personal preference, again.

applets use binary, it has the advantage of not requiring a parser on the client. Makes for smaller transfers.

Sending source tends to cause people to make false optimizations, such as leaving out comments. Worse, you have to worry that the client has the proper version of the parser. Not a way to win.

See all the problems with pages not displaying properly on Firefox, Safari, etc. that work great on M$ IE.



This is true, but it seems like a red herring. Sending stuff over slow lines is painful. Doesn't matter if its source code, binaries or movies. The definition of 'slow' varies with time and culture. In Korea today, they would laugh at what Americans think are fast broadband connections.

Contrary to what we developers think, its not the programs that folks care about. Its the content. The songs, video, etc.
So even if you had a perfect client side language, you are not addressing the real issue.

The closest thing that I can think of is :
Pick a server side scripting language , php, asp.net , python or whatever. Allow the coder to write actionscript and flex modules in the syntax of the chosen language(php,etc). Parse it, generate the proper flex and action script modules, compile them; you get the client side part of the application.
For the server part, the language is already chosen.
I am not sure how you can fit ajax into this scheme of things.

That can't work, you can't get funding without being able to claim Web 2.0 or even Web 3.0, which means you have to sing the Ajax song, even if you don't use most of the letters in ajax

If there's one language suited for "everything", I'd say that language is Lisp. Its bottom up programming paradigm lends itself to language creation, which means all the functionality of other languages can be subsumed while retaining a reasonably tight syntax. Lisp also happens to share a lot of features with JavaScript, in that they're both highly functional, support closures, treat functions as first class, have a high level of dynamism, and so on. Lisp and XML also share common ground, such as a foundation of S-expressions and high level of extensibility.

Other people noticed these similarities, which is why Lisp already does basically everything you mentioned. You can serve your website with hunchentoot, do all your back-end programming with Common Lisp, make use of its LINQ-like SQL bindings, map S-expressions to markup, and program in something called "ParenScript", a Lispy language which compiles to JavaScript. I'm not sure how you'd handle CSS, exactly, but I'm sure there's a library for that too.

I haven't used any of the stuff listed above, but just thought you should know that your idea's been taken... And you're probably best off not trying to reinvent the wheel.

All that effort to make things easier? How easy does it need to be? The more you abstract away, the less flexibility you have, ROR does a lot of abstracting, and you may have noticed that a few high profile, high traffic sites have decided to abandon it for it's lack of scalability. There is no substitute for simply improving your programming skills and your ability to jump from one thing to another.

Implementing what has been developed as a server side language into a sandboxed client side language can take many advantages out of the language and can leave security problems. If you really plan to do anything with a database you are going to have to learn SQL in one form or another. Though depending on the RDBMS you can write procedures with SQL, it isn't an ideal language for that purpose, no more than PHP alone would be a good language for retrieving data from database tables, rows and columns.

I think maybe you are looking for the wrong thing. Instead of a different language, try to stick with a type of coding, ie OOP, procedural or functional. PHP now has sufficient OOP features, Flash Actionscript 3 is fully object oriented, and Javascript, in a little over a years time will also be fully object oriented but even now is object oriented enough. Concentrate on writing and thinking in classes, objects, methods and properties and you will be able to jump from one to the other much easier.

You can't change the standards process or force a new language on users and you especially can't make a browser plug in work as a distribution model. Flash is bundled with most browsers, Adobe has overcome with that the main problem with wide distribution of their product. That alone took years to accomplish. Microsoft is promoting it's new Silverlight platform by emphasizing multiple run time languages as an advantage not a detriment.

Perl 6 has been in the oven for years now, with the promise of bringing multiple languages to a single runtime. There has been talk of using it in browsers, but time is running out on that. Once HTML5/Javascript 2.x starts to appear, any significant enthusiasm for that will fade.

The key to remembering where you are in an application or what language you are working in is practice and concentration. That comes with time. We all have to do it,

BTW, Adobe has now fully opened SWF, FLV and Flash player. There is no need to open the Flash IDE as with those open, anyone with the knowledge can put together their own IDE environment.

You might like to check out rebol. Essentially it's a client & server side solution. But the idea is the same - one language for every single thing.

also "tyle" as in tyler durden?

I admit I haven't used REBOL but from what I have seen and know of it yes that would certainly be easier than keeping your PHP and your javascript sorted ;-)

Yeah i haven't used it extensively beyond checking out some of it's capabilities because someone answered a tender bid with a rebol solution that was way low, but from what i've seen it's an interesting paradigm, something like abap .... not that i've used that one as well.