WO and alternative languages was Re: WWDC
WO and alternative languages was Re: WWDC
- Subject: WO and alternative languages was Re: WWDC
- From: Q <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 12:43:57 +1000
On 18/06/2007, at 2:18 AM, Bruce Fancher wrote:
As a typically lazy developer, one of the things I miss the most
from the
Objective-C version of WebObjects was the ability to very quickly
write and
refine pages with WebScript, and just sit there hitting reload
until I got
the code right. Much, much faster than the
code-compile-launch-test-stop-repeat cycle of using Java. You can
kinda
sorta do this using Eclipse's hot compile thing, but you can't add
methods
to a class or change the method signatures of existing methods, and it
sometimes explodes for reasons that I can't fathom, especially when
using it
remotely, so I don't end up using it that much. So the recent
trend towards
supporting dynamic languages in the JVM is a very welcome one.
You used to be able to do this to some degree with the
ERXCompilerProxy in Wonder, but it was designed for XCode, and I
think Anjo removed it a while back.
The WOGroovy framework offers similar functionality when you enable
rapid turnaround, with the limitation that existing instances of a
modified class are not changed, but this is a java class loader
restriction.
I attended a Ruby conference at Google's offices in NYC a couple of
months
ago and saw a pretty impressive demo of Rails running on JRuby.
Seems like
Sun is putting a lot of work into it, especially with regards to the
performance, so hopefully in the not too distant future it will be a
realistic option. Once all the kinks are worked out I imagine
developing
something akin to WOGroovy for JRuby would not be terribly difficult.
I haven't spent much time looking at how JRuby handles java
integration, but I suspect it might be a little bit more difficult
than with Groovy because of its internal class system and the way it
handles collections and arrays. I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult
for someone who knows ruby well enough.
Speaking of which, I've played around with WOGroovy and I was pretty
impressed with it. After a somewhat rocky start, Groovy has become
reasonably mature and WOGroovy seems to work well. It's also a
relatively
small project, which is reassuring. If it was some huge messy
framework I
would be worried about adopting it and then hitting a wall halfway
through a
project because of some hard to track down bug, but given it's
simplicity, I
think it would be fairly straightforward to track down and fix any
bugs that
might've been overlooked by the developer. All in all, it seems
like an
excellent and very useful framework.
That developer would be me. If you have any issues feel free to let
me know. ;)
As you have observed WOGroovy is a very small veneer to make using
groovy with WebObjects seamless. Outside the rapid turnaround code,
which is just some classloader magic, the WOGroovy framework itself
doesn't actually do much but inject some helper categories into the
metaclass registry. The fixes for the NS* collection handling are the
only really important bits, and they don't need to be "loaded", they
just need to be in the classpath somewhere.
--
Seeya...Q
Quinton Dolan - email@hidden
Gold Coast, QLD, Australia
Ph: +61 419 729 806
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| References: | |
| | >WWDC (From: Don Guernsey <email@hidden>) |
| | >Re: WWDC (From: Dana Kashubeck <email@hidden>) |
| | >Re: WWDC (From: Marc Guenther <email@hidden>) |
| | >Re: WWDC (From: Simon McLean <email@hidden>) |
| | >Re: WWDC (From: Q <email@hidden>) |
| | >Re: WWDC (From: Damien Petrilli <email@hidden>) |
| | >RE: WWDC (From: "Bruce Fancher" <email@hidden>) |