Currently (and ScrapBooked) i get this.
that’s updated may 18th.
It’s all irrelevant, cause I wasn’t sure if you were legit, and now I see you Absolutely are!!!

My apologies in a million different ways.

http://www.thereformed.org/2007/03/05/christianity-secular-bias-in-the-media/

I don’t see a post from you on that thread. Does anyone else?

But then what have I done? What have I created worth a crap? well some perl.. which fall in between eh? Some Basic, that’s garbage language, that again falls on the High level..

man maybe I need to just let it go and stop fighting.

Alright, this is my last post until I see someone answer my first post:
http://www.thereformed.org/2007/03/05/christianity-secular-bias-in-the-media/

I love your intent. I love your past!
an ex-sysop of the late 1990’s. Child of the 60’s.

blesed be

Interesting this topic. I agree that JavaScript is just too silly to be even mentioned a worthy language. But the cause of AJAX was to find the common denom(demon?)inator across all platforms for all browsers. Only when all the browsers implemented XMLHttpRequest did this AJAX thing really take off.

Now, if you think you have to work with JS all the time for AJAX applications, please have a look at the google web toolkit(google it, cause this comment box is not safe :). The GWT comes with a compiler from Java -> JS and programming in AJAX is much more Swing-like.

I’m loving that sort of thing. No, I am not in favor of JS that much, but this kind of innovation really creates websites that are interactive and where the browser only goes off to load something when it really matters. Result? Less DB access server-side, less work on the server, more work on the client, bigger “initial” page + .js to load when you access (see gmail).

Anyway, the point is that engineers nowadays are not interested in the “right, correct engineered” ways to do things. Whatever hack you feed to them is consumed immediately and somehow evolves into some sort of concoction that nobody has ever seen before.

And forget about J2EE. That is not dead in the water, but I believe not to stay for long.

I’ve recently had an idea to create a “distributed” VM. This is… heuristics inside the VM that serve to analyze how the application can distribute *itself* across a number of servers. So the VM would basically implement some C-code that would communicate with other VM’s and then instrument calls and other objects with Java proxies to be calling the functionality on other servers (first step). Later steps are to provide failover etc… The point of this is to create applications that provide functionality only, without having the failover and specific interfaces and what not. The JVM will distribute this application across different cluster (maybe even in a chained cluster model). May have to do with cluster computing eventually.

Doing this thing with C is really complicated. Java has the JVMTI and JNI, so development is significantly reduced. Plus it has a good specification for class files and such.

Cheers,

Chiraz

Did just find this though, which I though was interesting:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00006BQWT/103-6064316-2226242?v=glance&url=www.hack-net.com/

“its like linux, how many libs and patches and mods do you need to install something like a simple analogue clock?”

This is a classic example of why naitive is just so frustrating sometimes, especially with open source code. Library after library, hours of scouring GNU.org just to compile a scrap of some crap you can’t even remember the name of, the goal shifts from compiling your application to just getting all the right libraries installed, and then uninstalling all the pre-packaged rpm’s or pre compiled packages (distro depending) so you don’t get conflicts.

Programming is getting easier but at the same time becoming more confused with so many different technologies available and so much choice, the different toolkits and libraries available is clouding the end goal, its no longer ‘I want to create this application’ it’s now ‘I want to create this application, but which crossover of technology do I use? can someone show me what to do?’

A blank sheet of paper, or an empty whiteboard - which technologies to use? its more confusing that actually building the application.

J2EE is the biggest buzz word muddle of them all, half the people building J2EE apps don’t have a clue what J2EE actually is? its just a muddle of different protocols, frameworks and building styles. Even JavaFaces is split in two now with the Apache project having its own version as well as Sun.

Scripted languages are not always guaranteed to run, especially like within PHP you use third party unbundled libraries that are referenced by PHP like libmcrypt and IMAP, countless times I have seen badly written php.ini files that utterly screw up an application on different systems, and what is worse if you use the PEAR modules, hald the time they fall over because the installation of pear on the target server is ancient or improperly installed due to a bodged PHP installation.

So yes, portable it may be but stable is another opinion. Same with Java - very portable, no need for third party libs (unless you need to access the tcp stack in which you need lipcap installed), however can slow down to a crawl on a process heavy server.

“As chiraz said, PHP / Ruby / Python and all the other scripted languages don’t have the powerful compiling and debugging facilities available to Java. As they are compiled at run time, its only then that the interpreter come compiler will work out there is a problem.”

While I dont see such scripting languages as PHP, Ruby etc common on the desktop, I believe there will be a big shift in “live” applications, AJAX, RSS, XML being widely used on the desktop. The advantages that a server control system offers over a client based or native application, is that if you test thoroughly, your parser shouldnt encounter any errors or bugs. With pure client side applications, however, you cant be sure that you system will work on the host machine, its like linux, how many libs and patches and mods do you need to install something like a simple analogue clock? (Ok its alot better these days). Consumer machines are too variable to code for in a general way - IE7 still isnt ready for anything but XP/Vista, Napster To Go works with ONLY on XP SP2 with WMP 10. People want customised, fast and integrated access to all their content - essentially, they want their own personal GUI, a virtual desktop in a can so to speak.

As chiraz said, PHP / Ruby / Python and all the other scripted languages don’t have the powerful compiling and debugging facilities available to Java. As they are compiled at run time, its only then that the interpreter come compiler will work out there is a problem.

Hibernate and other such object persistence is changing the way server side applications are networked over time, Its only a matter of time before this level of abtraction is available to the scripted languages, and then what?

I personally think that although incredibly useful, I can never see PHP becoming *the* choice for desktop application developers. It’s foundations are just not there to support such capabilities, the same with python (but in reverse) its ultra scientific nature makes it perfect for mathematics, but as an every day application development environment its just to clunky.

Whats more interesting is JavaScript and its return to the forefront of Web 2.0! all this AJAX making an appearance recently, yeah sure its fantastic but really I still find it to be a solution without a problem. Its also become integral to Widgets for Dashboard in OSX. Who would have thought that one of the most unreliable and worst supported scripted languages would become so important after it was considered dead when flash made an appearance? now it seems that flash is old hat and javascript is for the pro’s?

which way will it turn next? websites with more than one image on it will be considered vulgar?

discuss.