Lightweight Languages Blog

Automator: More Than Meets the Eye

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 10:19:35 -0500

Mike Reilly's recent conversation with Sal Soghoian, product manager for automated technologies at Apple, really is an eye-opener if, like me, you've underestimated Apple's Automator Technology. Automator is a technology for building workflows out of actions by visually wiring together a sequence of those actions. As such, it's an end-user app, a visual programming tool for novices. But one of the common misconceptions about Automator, even among developers, is that actions are just wrappers for Applescript. Not so. As it turns out, you can build Automator actions from just about any language, which gives them enormous flexibility and untility for developers.

Bray Talks Tech

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 12:21:07 -0500

Tim Bray is truly one of the guys that just keeps the Internet humming along. He's the co-author of the XML 1.0 spec, and co-chairs the IETF AtomPub Working Group. His main job these days, however, is to evangelize developer technologies inside Sun, and to get the word out to developers about technologies being developed by Sun. He describes himself as a "two-way evangelist." John Dorsey had a talk with him at RailsConf2007.

Picking an AJAX Framework

Mon, 07 May 2007 12:27:08 -0500

The AJAX framework space is really starting to look like a robust place to do development these days. The number of choices is proliferating, and the level of maturity and polish in these frameworks is remarkable, and improving by the day. But not all frameworks are created equal, of course. How to choose? You need to consider how well the framework fits the style and structure of your development team. Critically, you need to see how well the widgets in the framework map to the desired feature set in your app. And then you need to know how easy those widgets are to customize. Andrew Turner and Chao Wang make it all a bit easier for you by revealing their decision-making process when choosing a framework for their latest project in "AJAX: Selecting the Framework that Fits."

Getting Started in LSL

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 12:30:44 -0500

This week, we continue our focus on the Second Life virtual environment. As a programmer, what do you need to know? First, and possibly most important, is that nearly everything you see and touch in SL was created not by Linden Labs, Second Life's creator, but by user-programmers within the virtual world. With the Linden Scripting Language, and Second Life's built-in IDE, you can create fabulous objects and (potentially) get paid for them. Here's how.

Scripting a Brave New World?

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:33:06 -0500

Unless your cave is particularly dark and deep, you've no doubt heard about Second Life, the virtual world where players own land, gather together with like-minded avatars, and run businesses (sometimes even successfully, though that's not the norm yet). Is it a bright, shiny, brand-new world with huge potential, or a flash in the pan? At Dr. Dobb's, we're betting on the former, which is why we've just announced our Dr. Dobb's Life 2.0 project. This is a world where code creates value, so it's a natural place for good programmers to shine. To help you do this, we're committed to bringing you the tools you need to be successful in this virtual universe. For starters, check out "Using the Linden Scripting Language."

Future-Proof Mapping

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 14:00:01 -0500

Maps are on everyone's web site these days. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have made it pretty easy. But can you count on these services working as you expect well into the future? If you need to switch from one map provider to another, how easy will that be? Lionel Laské creates an API that insulates you from changes like these, making it an easy matter to switch from one provider to another without extensive code changes. Read all about it in "MyMap: A Portable API for Maps."

Delivering the Goods

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 14:18:43 -0500

AJAX and other Web 2.0 technologies continue to have explosive growth. Increasingly, the pressure is on to deliver fast, lightweight and secure apps with the new technology. But developers face a number of hurdles. As so often happens in the software world, this is a case of an initial technology being used for something it was never designed for. HTTP was never meant to do what we're now asking of it. So there are performance issues. There are also security risks. In "The AJAX Application Delivery Challenge," Lori MacVittie lays out the problems facing Web 2.0.

Trust Me

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 13:52:50 -0500

One of the reasons I love small, lightweight scripting languages is the way they often are used: as the glue to hold together a loose confederation of cooperating (or occasionally competing) technologies. I've always found it strangely comforting—sort of an algorithmic "can't we all just get along" plea. So it's also fitting that many of these languages have been instrumental in creating the latest crop of Web endeavors, which themselves are highly dependent on trusted interactions, not only between software components, but between people. In his article "Web 2.0 and the Engineering of Trust," Michael Swaine explores the issue of trust, one crucial component of Web 2.0 businesses.

A Common Framework

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 14:39:17 -0500

The Rich Internet Application (RIA) world these days is a soup of technologies looking for a common ingredient. Consider all the varied and often overlapping technologies for creating web app functionality: JavaScript, AJAX, Java, XML, HTML, and Flash all either compete or cooperate in building today's crop of web apps. Will we someday have a uniform, well-defined way of building components for this new platform? Jim Grandy of Laszlo Systems thinks so.

Syntact-Ick

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 10:42:43 -0500

I sort of hate to bag on Applescript, because it's an amazingly powerful tool for automating tasks in Mac OS X. Truth be told, I couldn't do my job without it. Well, okay, users of bash, tcsh or zsh won't be impressed, probably. But that's the thing: Applescript was supposed to be the caring, sharing scripting language for the rest of us. But sometimes it absolutely drives me round the bend.

Get Ready for PyCon

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 11:57:54 -0500

PyCon 2007 may be several months away, but the conference is now accepting papers. Held Feb. 23-25 in Addison, Texas, the conference will feature a series of thirty-minute talks, keynote speakers (TBD), and five-minute lightning talks. The deadline for submissions is October 31.

Documentation: The Neverending Battle

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 13:13:40 -0500

Over the years at Dr. Dobb's, I have slowly developed a system, written mostly in Perl, for extracting the content of articles from the print Dr. Dobb's Journal and tagging it as HTML. I must confess it's a monstrous tangle of spaghetti code. But that's not my biggest sin. My biggest sin is documentation, or specifically the lack of it.

SD Best Practices

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 14:38:33 -0500

Software development is about a lot more than code. Successful companies have to see the whole picture and the whole process, start to finish. From requirements and analysis, through architecture and design, to building, deploying, testing and QA, you can get the information you need to succeed at the SD Best Practices Conference and Expo, held Sept. 11-14 in Boston.

Mmm... Mango

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 16:26:35 -0500

I like it when nice folks get recognized for their work, which is why I'm pleased to see Christopher Laco getting a grant from The Perl Foundation to develop Mango, an ecommerce app based on the Catalyst MVC framework and the Christopher's own Handel ecommerce framework. Catalyst is pretty great, and apps built on top of it are often great, too. Nice going, Christopher.

New Voices

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 11:34:11 -0500

I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome a new blogger to the fold here in the Lightweight Languages Department. These days, the alternative language scene is all about the burgeoning rich functionality of the web. Jeff Hicks, our newest blogger, is all about these technologies: Rails, AJAX, Python, Zope, and a host of other tools that make the web a more useful (but more complicated) place. Welcome, Jeff!