I am thinking of making J interoperability seamless and transparent.  It will 
make it easier to embed J on the server-side if we make its interface familiar 
and standard, and in the current state of the IT world, that means web services.

A WS interface will allow us to use modern frontend toolkits to write 
user-facing (browser-based) apps, e.g. in Flash, Silverlight, or more likely in 
days to come, HTML5.

It'll also make it easier to offer headless J-based services into IT depts, 
with leas of the usual friction we encounter when presenting a new, (extremely) 
unfamiliar language.

In short, it lets us express ourselves in the way we prefer (i.e. J code) while 
allowing the outside world to interact with us in the way they prefer (i.e. web 
services).

For this to work, I shine the WS interface has to be implemented natively in J; 
if we require a (specific) technology stack, we risk igniting the kind of holy 
war we are specifically tying to avoid.

-Dan

Please excuse typos; composed on a handheld device.

On Apr 24, 2013, at 3:46 PM, Greg Borota <[email protected]> wrote:

> Dan, do you mind giving details on what you have in mind? I quickly
> hacked-up a .NET based restful service during my lunch time. It has 2 URLs:
> http:/localhost:8080/do/j_sentence  - Execute the given j_sentence and
> return the string result (result could be xml, json, html, etc).
> http:/localhost:8080/reset - reset J session for current HTTP session =
> come-up with a clean slate.
> 
> A session is created on the fly when you hit the URL and it's alive as long
> you keep the browser open. Multiple users (or browsers) could hit same
> service and each would have their own session.
> 
> Before sharing the code (after I am done with my day job), I would like to
> know more what you have in mind. Interesting idea by the way, to have J
> service. Just that I think we would need more definition.
> 
> By the way, Do(m)n in my native tongue (which is not Spanish but Latin
> based) is a very respectful term. It's usually used with Lastname
> (Firstname). And it's more respectful than Mr. in US - m in there is almost
> unheard.
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 8:26 AM, Greg Borota <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> Don Bron Dan could you please elaborate on the uses you see for this web
>> service? With .NET. IIS and the Pinvoke layer this should be just a
>> few hours of work. Do others find this of great use?
>> 
>> But service would have to be installed under Windows. I am not that much
>> up to date with other platforms, these days.
>> (I used to be a Linux developer but jobs I had moved me away from it...)
>> 
>> 
>> On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 7:41 PM, Dan Bron <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>>> Can I just point out that no one uses desktop apps anymore? It's probably
>>> be a bigger boon to the community to implement a robust web services
>>> framework and interface to J then yet another implementation of WD.
>>> 
>>> -Dan
>>> 
>>> Please excuse typos; composed on a handheld device.
>>> 
>>> On Apr 23, 2013, at 8:37 PM, Greg Borota <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I see there are already a bunch of wd implementation: native, GTK, QT.
>>>> I wonder what was the effort involved in implementing wd in say GTK or
>>> QT.
>>>> Months, weeks?
>>>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
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