On 15 Jan 2004, at 16:39, Brian McCallister wrote:
=(
The biggest problem I have selling coworkers on Flow is the JavaScript. Too many bad associations from scripting in browsers (despite the fact that the more I play with JS the nicer the language gets) for most people, I think.
Been there, done that.
Javascript has nothing to do with DHTML problems: it was (and still is) lack of a standard object model and event mechanism (even if things are much better nowadays).
Javascript is just a language, syntax plus some basic semantics, it's not a platform.
The way I sell it is that cocoon has two higher level programming languages (sitemap and flowscript) gluing components written in a high level programming language (java). Sitemap uses the xml syntax, flowscript uses the javascript syntax... because the first leverages the HTML-injected angled brakets mindset, but without SGML problems, the second uses the java-injected curly braces mindset, but without the java overhead of strong typing, compilation-induced slow try/fail cycles.
With blocks and a compiling classloader, we'll reach nirvana of web RAD but without compromising architectural elegance and SoC.
But it could be much worse: flowscript used to use the scheme syntax ;-)
-- Stefano.
