Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 07:02:08 -0400 From: Dan Jacobs Subject: WebTech Tues 8/21 7pm IBM Waltham Hi everybody. This is a last-minute reminder about the WebTech meeting tomorrow, Tuesday, 8/21 7pm at the IBM SPC in Waltham. Details and directions are available at http://www.acm.org/chapters/webtech. This month's meeting will feature an intriguing presentation by Christopher Fry of GlueWorks Inc. on "Glue: An Easier Way to Build Web Applications." As per tradition, everyone is invited to gather for dinner before the meeting at the Green Papaya restaurant on Winter Street (near Bertucci's). Let me know if you plan to come for dinner so I can get a good table. I hope to see you there! -- Dan Jacobs, Chairperson ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Abstract: The Web is a tremendous opportunity for standards bodies to be prolific. The standards being adopted aren't good enough to fulfill the needs so there appears to always be room for more. And each new standard is complex enough that you need several books on it to really use it. Perhaps some programmers enjoy the challenge of swimming in alphabet soup but the rest of us are drowning in it. - HTML is good enough for static presentation period. - XML is mediocre at static data representation and doesn't even attempt dynamic data. - Java is ok for simple code but isn't a very high level language and wasn't designed to deal with XML or HTML. - If you think Perl is a language, don't come to this talk - C and variants don't attempt to deal with the web except perhaps as crude add-ons. - Javascript tries hard to get dynamism into HTML but has an object system few can understand. - Python's got some good features but interfacing with XML isn't one of them. - And then there's all the platforms that these languages must integrate into. Its not enough to simply understand several standards to put together a modern web application. You've also got to know how to connect up the semi-compatible (at best) languages to make a coherent program. Glue solves the problem by attacking the whole problem head on, not some little piece that makes 20% easy. Glue is fully object oriented [unlike Java] with an object system designed for the web. It uses an XML syntax. HTML is a (small) subset of Glue. Glue is considerably more flexible and dynamic than the other popular general purpose languages out there with special benefits for web services. This talk will be technical.