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[REBOL] Re: InformIT.com Articles Introduction to Water™ A New Native We

From: kemp:extelligence at: 28-Aug-2002 11:45

Creating a Web services with a single platform such as J2EE typically requires the use of a dozen or more technologies and languages such as XML, HTML, SQL, XSLT, JSP, JavaServlets, JavaScript, JavaDoc, CSS, and shell scripts. In contrast, Water adheres to a Learn Once, Use Everywhere" philosophy that allows you to apply a simple set of methods to all aspects of development. Water leverages your current investment in technology by integrating with existing systems and Web services. Water can eliminate the need for most special-purpose languages and tools thus lowering development costs." Hmmm. Never heard anything like THAT before... :) I totally agree with the first sentence, though. Current web development practices are INSANEly burdensome, and although I don't believe in silver bullets, there has to be a middle ground. REBOL, for me, is part of that middle ground. I think I recall someone on this list mentioning something I agree with totally - XML is heirarchical in nature, and most of our problems are not - so XML is not going to get us very far by it's very structure, never mind the inefficiencies of transformation, marshalling, large data packets, unmarshalling, parsing, transforming, etc. Water is a Java 2 app, BTW, and I bet that most folks will find out quickly they need to drop into XML, HTML, SQL, XSLT, JSP, JavaServlets, JavaScript, JavaDoc, CSS, and shell scripts in order to reach all audiences with all browsers on all machines with the current mess we have created. That said, I would love to see REBOL embeddable in browsers (REBOL Web Start/Services, anyone?), and IOS seriously scaleable/multithreaded/multiprocessor on the backend. REBOL is a great language with a ton of potential (500K with a compositing GUI on 42 platforms is nothing short of AMAZING), but the world is HTML, JavaScript and browsers for quite a while yet, and REBOL has to play in that sandbox - more than just HTML/XML parsing support, it needs to be integrated. Kemp