techno.blog("Dion")

I have been watching the JetBrains MPS story for awhile, thinking that if someone can pull off MDA it would be JetBrains. And, Neal Ford keeps going on about it ;)

They did the smart thing and build a DSL builder that automatically gives you a nice IDE around your DSL.

A new demo screencast is out that shows webr which is a DSL way of building web sites in very short order indeed.

If I was going to write a book on it I would say “watch out Rails, MPS is going to kick arse”. Since I am not writing a book on it, I would say that it very interesting to watch and see. We are still some time out…. but I hope it reaches its potential.

EJB was great for consultants. Complicated software is always good for consultants. Companies need to pay you to explain the darn thing.

Just look at how good COM was for Don Box :)

I think one of the next beasts like this will be offline web applications. With Apollo, Slingshot, Dojo, and the other offline toolkits coming out we are going to see a lot of people saying “I want that”, and “make this work offline”.

The web is a world of connectivity. We have been building applications that take that assumption for granted. Now, with offline, we are changing the paradigm.

Beware the seemless example

Remember the talk of EJB where you can just call a method on a stub and it could be local or remote. Who knows! It was this ignorance that enabled a slew of applications that ran dog slow as they talked across network boundaries and serialized data back and forth all day.

Writing offline capable web applications is going to be hard to do right. We are going to have to take a step back and rethink how our applications are going to work with a new dimension added to the mix.

If you want to make a lot of money consulting, get good at building offline web apps and rake it in :)

At the last minute I was tempted into the world of April fools, but decided that it wouldn’t be taken in the right way. The idea was to spoof the launch of an Ajax library from Google itself named GAjax (Google Ajax).

The fake post would have read something like this:

When I started to work at Google in the open source team one of the first things I did was to find the Gmail team and ask them how they develop such a rich Ajax application. There were rumours of a Google internal library, and I had to see what was available.

I was amazed to see how powerful the tool is, and made it my mission to get this to out into the developer community.

I am now proud to announce that Google has open sourced Gajax, the Google rapid ajax development platform. This is the RAD tool that Google uses internally on products such as Gmail, Google Maps, and the like.

There are several pieces to the tool:

a) Rich cross browser JavaScript library: At the core, the framework sits on top of a rock solid cross browser implementation that degrades automatically for clients with JavaScript turned off. It even works with browsers such as Netscape 2, IE 3, and WebTV. Mobile devices are also seemlessly supported.
b) CSS library: With this library, you write your UI in HTML tables and the tool strips it and converts to a CSS3-based semantic layout.
c) Component platform: Rich components such as encapsulate all of the functionality into high level views. The front page of Gmail is only 10 lines of code due to component reuse. This is an example of our new AWST technology (automatically wire stuff together).

We had an pre-launch event where we invited Ajax luminaries from the various other frameworks. Here is what some of the leaders in the Ajax space had to say about Gajax:

Alex Russell: “We have suspected that Google has a secret Ajax library, and now the cat is out of the bag. We are committed to abstracting this library so you can use it from within Dojo”

Bill Scott: “All I can say is WoW. I am going to recommend re-evaluating YUI and seeing if we can join Google in their endeavor to create the simplest Ajax framework in the open web.”

Sam Stephenson: Sam was unavailable to comment.

Kevin Lynch: “We are disengaging work on the Spry framework, and will work to integrate Gajax into the new Apollo stack. Gajax will become offline shortly”

Next year we will get around to something…. I do have jsonhunter.com ;)