Last week, I mentioned David Ascher's musing about Web 3.0, where you can do all kinds of interactive AJAX-y stuff, backends, web services, database-fu, and whatnot, all from the comfort of your favorite "one true programming language". After all, it's a pain to deal with one language within the confines of the browser, and another one (or two, or three) on the web server, all with different module systems, object models, syntaxes, and other trivia when writing one app.
Turns out that David isn't the only one who thinks this way. A couple of Lispniks have come up with something tentatively called ParenScript, a library that translates Lisp code into JavaScript suitable for running in a web page. From there, it's just a hop skip and a jump to using AJAX scripts (written in Lisp or some other host language, and translated into JavaScript) that automagically handle cross-browser bogosities, and take advantage of the host language's packaging system (CPAN, ghc-pkg, raa, bknr, whatever).
Neat!
via lemonodor
As you said previously... JavaScript isn't satisfying - just because. So obfuscating the creation of JavaScript behind a "compatability layer" (by whatever name) just seems like, well... a cheat.
To this - I would harken back to pure, unadulterated Java. If layering compatability in front of AJAX isn't monolithic... what's wrong with Java again?
Yeah, it's slow to start... but that is likely to improve (already production Sun versions since 1.4 allow to have Java's engine "pre-loaded" on startup). However - Java _is_ an 'easy' requirement to sell.
I guess I'm trying to get to the bottom of it. What are you looking for in 3WL? OpenGL (or equiv)? Full [gui] platform independance? Are you also looking for Browser 3.0 to go along with it - and roll out globally (back to HotJava - Sun's defunct Java Native web browser)? Once finished... can/will Parrot fit the bill (assuming it get's a decent client-side / plugin interface)? Might Perl be the answer - or will it/could it lie elsewhere?...
What about
So given the direction the technologies are already moving (including my two examples above, and others) - what parts are you looking for that are still missing? Do you think Parrot will/can fill the gaps?
