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Programming IT Technology

BOA: Web Scripting In Pure HTML 20

Posted by timothy from the snakes-are-everywhere-now dept.
Dmitry Dvoinikov writes: "I'm very excited about the web scripting language I had to learn and use with the company I currently work for. It's absolutely unknown to public, used in may be dozen of places around the world. But it's so great, I thought it deserves more publicity. So, here is the introductory article about the BOA web scripting engine. And here is its homepage if you are interested." If you know any PHP or perl, the small "hello webreaders" comparison is interesting (and Yes, favors Boa;) ).
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BOA: Web Scripting In Pure HTML More

BOA: Web Scripting In Pure HTML

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  • Geeze, you take "older stuff" offline and the trolls vanish! "First Post" has never been this easy! Anyway, I just wanted to thank Dmitry Dvoinikov and timothy for telling me about this, and I hope to find time to read more (maybe over Christmas break :-)

    (is there an award for "1st First Post"? Do I lose karma instantly, or will it take someone actually reading this and modding me down?)

    • What happened to #1? What happened to my "first post"? I finally get a first post, and it's #2200142?


      This is gonna make it difficult to meta-moderate those "redundant" moderations. Usually if post #284 is "redundant" you can believe them, and if post #2 is "redundant" you gotta wonder what the moderator is smoking. How am I supposed to judge the merit of calling post #2200142 "redundant"? Hmmm, I guess we gotta read the entire discussion to meta-moderate now. Maybe I just won't meta-moderate the "redundant" posts...

      • Re:Thanks (Score:1)

        by PD ( 9577 )
        Your first post has been foiled, as it should be. And if you haven't been reading the entire discussion as moderator, then you shouldn't have been moderating. If you can't do it right, then just do us all a favor and don't moderate.

        • If you'd read my "first post" you would see that I was posting a comment that happened to be the first post, which I remarked upon because that was a new experience for me. Usually "first post"s are by the "First Post!"ers who get there, well, first. My post was not "foiled" by the new numbering scheme, and I don't understand why you think it should have been.


          If you'd read my next post, the one you replied to, you'd have seen that I was talking about meta moderation [slashdot.org], not moderation. Do you really read the entire discussion when you meta-moderate? You do? When deciding of one moderation of one post is fair or unfair, you read the entire discussion? Really? Wow! That's dedication, and I bow to you, sir. However, I don't think that's necessary to "do it right" and I will continue to only read the relevant posts when I meta-moderate, not the entire discussion. If you disagree then you're free to hunt me down and spend your 5 moderation points trying to erase my karma to prevent my poor meta-moderation.


          I still think that the new numbering system will make it harder to meta-moderate "redundant" moderation. Of course, if you really read the entire discussion when you meta-moderate then you would disagree. Show of hands: how many /.ers read the entire discussion when meta-moderating? how many read the whole thing when moderating?

          • I think the numbering system might be a less important bug that should be fixed as soon as the lads have worked out the other complexities of the new system. Hopefully your message should eventually be displayed with a #1. More importantly, though, we need to hurt someone for these stupid domain hints next to any links. Have we not heard of mouseover showing a link's destination?

            . [im.com] . [not.com] . [being.com] . [pedanticcom] . [i.com] . [can.com] . [think.com] . [of.com] . [situations.com] . [where.com] . [this.com] . [may.com] . [suck.com]
            • Apparantly, the new numbering scheme is intentional to prevent "First Post!" bandwidth wasters. Therefore it's not a bug to fix when the lads have free time, it's a feature for the rest of us to live with.


              Apparantly there are a lot of /. readers who are not geeks and do not know how to turn on MSIE's Status Bar (clue for the clueless: it's under "View"). Therefore it's a feature for the rest of us to turn off (it's under Preferences: Comments [slashdot.org], at the bottom).

              To the /. staff: You could have mentioned this "feature", and how to turn it off, when you dumped 2.2 on us [slashdot.org]. Thanks to whoever pointed out how to disable it (in the referenced discussion, but search is down so I can't find the post).


              Now, if there were only a way to hide the embeded domain names when people quote... Clue for the clueless: It flags you as a dweeb -- moreso than an aol.com email address. Not only do you not know why you don't need it (or at least how to turn it off), you don't preview your posts and thus didn't notice the embeded domain name in your quote.


              (note to bendude: the above "you" didn't mean you!)

            • I guess it's to cut down on the www.goatse.cx crap
              • What kind of irresponsible person would link to goatse.cx [http]? Actually, since I was modded down for alluding to the goatse.cx site, I've taken the attitude of "If you can't take responsibility for what you instruct your computer to do then you'll need to be shown just how horrible some things can be out there. Mayby then, people will think about the consequences before they click on something they havn't bothered to investigate. Do the words "I LUV YOU" or "I send you this document for your comment" ring a bell?
        • You bloody moron. Nothing is worse than some idiot who cannot follow a discussion, but isists that everyone shut up and listen to his/her ill informed opinion.

          Are you familiar with the term Meta-Moderate [slashdot.org]?
  • There is another program called BOA (also called the BOA Constructor). It's a gui builder and IDE for python (it's quite good) which can be found here [sourceforge.net]. This BOA also looks cool. It seems to have all the basic requirements to be a productive web developer (db access, regex, encapsulating html object in special tags). I might give it a try.

  • Wow, does BOA look limited. I can see how it would be a viable alternative for extremely simple web apps, but the lack of complexity looks pretty damned crippling to me when you start looking at deploying more complex applications.

    • I'm getting tired of repeating myself :-) (my previous posts are somehow lost in the /. upgrade)


      I disagree that BOA is limited. The "deftag" tag lets you define your own tags, and how they behave. "xoptions" allows you to add libraries of 3rd-party tags. Any language this extensible is not limited.

    • What limitations are you refering to? You'll have to be more specific. Maybe it doesn't have parametric polymorphism or multiple inheritance but it looks O.K. to me.

      • what strikes me as the major limitation is the fact that it is document markup.

        while there are times when being able to place routines inside documents is an advantage, there are times when the document itself gets in the way of visualizing the application's logic

        it may be that I am unduly extrapolating from experience with commercial products that have similar features, but I prefer to write code that produces a document as output, not a document that contains code.

        For example, I find writing a CGI to produce HTML is more powerful than inserting ASP code into my HTML documents. My own limitation rather than the language? Maybe...

        Crystal Reports' interface is similar in concept, throwing code into discrete areas of a document...

  • It's interesting, but I fail to see anything that makes BOA notable. Sure, it uses tags in its language (which, by the way, does *not* make BOA "absolute[ly] html"), but other than that, it's no different than PHP or ASP, et. al. In fact the BOA home page describes itself as "yet another server-side scripting language".
  • BOA looks nice, but I still think I'll rather take Website Meta Language [engelschall.com] - it lets me define the tags AND use Perl and other languages to build static pages.
  • It seems from the article like the big selling point is that the coding is all done via tags (despite how much the author calls the "HTML tags", they're not HTML, since HTML describes the set of tags, not the syntax of tagging in the first place). Big woop, there are app server languages out there that have done this for years (such as Art Technology Group's Dynamo product). Is it XML compliant? HTML wasn't. Does it support namespaces? Internationalization? Can I define my own tags?

    As always, the question is why would I want yet another language like this? Is the fact that you have to use a % sign more frequently in your JSP tags really THAT much of a big deal, given that you have all of Java at your disposal?

  • I see this as yet another example of the mistaken idea that HTML-like tags make a language more user-friendly. Glossing over the difference between server-side code and client-side markup will only lead to confusion in the long run.

    People need to understand that server-side templating systems (in the sense that includes PHP, JSP, BRL [sourceforge.net]; not the limited WebMacro/Velocity definition of template), work by a sort of editorial process. I choose a syntax that acknowledges that editorial process.

    Take the first example from the BOA tutorial. What's server-side instructions and what's client side markup? If you're not familiar with HTML it might be hard to tell the difference.

    <setvar name=a value=1>
    <strong>this is a strong <insert name=a></strong>

    In contrast, the following code makes it clear what is literal HTML (what the browser will get), and what is an editorial instruction.

    [(define a 1)]
    <strong>this is a strong [a]</strong>

    Other advantages of square-bracket syntax:

    • The performance penalty of doing a table lookup for every HTML tag is eliminated.
    • If you misspell setvar, BOA sends the tag literally; a beginner will need some time to figure out what happened. If you misspell define, BRL will send an error message; it's obvious what happened.
    • More conciseness; less typing.
    • The syntax makes sense even in non-SGML markup, e.g. LaTeX [latex-project.org].
  • This really defines "dumbing down". The developers of BOA were simply bored. They even admit that its "just another server-side scripting language". Their description cites the flaws of real languages (like Perl) - that it is too hard, and that too many concepts must be learnt before any development can be done. What wimps.

    I think that developers and designers who actually know real programming languages and real HTML (not WYSIWYG-editor crap) have a great advantage in that knowing these concepts is a good indicator of your overall intelligence - something potential employers should be looking for.

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