Tracy R Reed([EMAIL PROTECTED])@Sun, May 07, 2006 at 12:31:11PM -0700: > One of the reasons I still have not learned any AJAX type stuff is that > I consider javascript a crummy language and I am annoyed that it has > become the standard for running in browsers. Rather than an actual > language it would have been nicer if they had just included a generic VM > (a la jvm) which we could target our perl/python/Jython/php/whatever > code to and write code in the language of our preference. But since that > is not the case we are stuck with javascript. >
One thing that i've wondered on occasion... Why is it that no one has written a Firefox extension that can deal with a different scripting language directly? Instead of writing python that gets translated into javascript, wouldn't it be better to write python that runs as python in the browser without translation? Of course, that only addresses Firefox. Maybe it would need to be implemented as a mime-type handler in some other browsers... just thinking out loud, mostly. > I just ran across this paper which has a very interesting idea: Why not > compile our preferred language (python) into javascript for execution on > the client? Then we only have to deal with one language and can > integrate it cleanly into the class libraries of our web application > programming platform (zope/plone). Taking a purely superficial view, it seems that if your code were going to be translated into javascript, then it would cripple your ability to really use any of the more interesting classes in the client code. "Ooops! can't use that class because it doesn't translate to javascript!" If you were to use python directly, though, I imagine the imported classes could be included from the server, and/or overridden by the client (a la greasemonkey). How is java implemented in browers? Could Java currently do the things that javascript is being used for in AJAX? > > If this were integrated with TAL or METAL such that certain XML tags > call python functions which are rendered into javascript for the client > to execute in the page instead of HTML to render in the page it could > all integrate fairly seamlessly and give our favorite web application > server and CMS a big boost in AJAX capabilities: > > http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/links/papers/links-icfp06/links-icfp06.pdf > I've not heard of TAL or METAL until now. At what point does TAL/METAL call out to the functions? It sounds kind of like a macro setup, of sorts, to me. Although I like macros a lot, in this case it seems like smothering lousy food with lots of gravy. It still seems that if the J in AJAX were replaceable in a modular style, it might be better. APEX "Asynchronous Python Et XML" ATAX "Asynchronous Tcl And XML" AMESS "Asynchronous VB and XML" Bleah. Hmmm. I mentioned Java above because most browsers already have it available. But it also has a "sandbox". We really don't want to encourage AMESS. There is already too much willingness to execute untrustworthy code. If Java really wouldn't work for this, then at least it may provide a model for how a different interpreter could operate with various browsers. Maybe it wouldn't be too difficult to make happen... Wade Curry -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
