Google Engineer: We Need More Web Programming Languages 309
itwbennett (1594911) writes Web applications may one day surpass desktop applications in function and usability — if developers have more programming languages to choose from, according to a Google engineer. 'The Web is always available, except when it is not,' said Gilad Bracha, software engineer at Google and one of the authors of Google Dart, speaking to an audience of programmers Wednesday at the QCon developer conference in New York. 'It isn't always available in a way that you can always rely on it. You may have a network that is slow or flaky or someone may want to charge you.' Therefore any Web programming language, and its associated ecosystem, must have some way of storing a program for offline use, Bracha said. The Web programming language of the future must also make it easier for the programmer to build and test applications.
Re:No, we don't (Score:2, Informative)
Main Web Languages Server side...
PHP - While there is a windows port this is for the Linux Guys
JSP - For people who wants to pretend that their web app is a serious business application.
ASP.NET - For the people stuck on a windows network.
They all have different levels of suckyness. They were made for web pages a over decade old. Where most stuff was Server Side processing.
Browser side
JavaScipt
VBScript
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Those do exist, for example Google Web Toolkit (GWT) which spits out Javascript and HTML from Java code that you write and manages the communications between the Javascript in the web page and the Java code running on the server. There are difficulties, though, because Javascript and HTML are really kind of sucky for running GUIs and it takes tweaking to get everything looking good in every browser.
Personally, I think that running complex applications inside the browser is just plain stupid but it keeps on getting pushed at us.
We don't need more languages, we need bytecode. (Score:4, Informative)
Mozilla's ASM.JS is much better idea and much closer to a real-life usage scenario, but Google itself is not doing enough to promote it and their support is half assed (even though It would definitely benefit them).
Containment by default (Score:5, Informative)
Except once it's offline it's no longer contained...
How? Pretty much every major platform other than Windows desktop, OS X, and GNU/Linux has some sort of containment measure by default. This includes Windows Phone, Windows RT and Windows 8's WinRT subsystem, Android, iOS, and modern game consoles.