Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 07:26:45 -0400 From: Dan Jacobs Subject: WebTech Tues 5/20 - Web Services & Apps with Water Hi everybody, and happy Spring! The May WebTech meeting will be held on Tuesday, May 20, from 7 to 9 pm, at the IBM SPC in Waltham. Details and directions at the website, at http://www.acm.org/chapters/webtech. Last month's open discussion was a lot of fun, and extremely thought-provoking. Thanks to everybody who participated! This month, we return to the main concerns of the WebTech group with a presentation from Mike Plusch of ClearMethods Inc. on "Building Web Services and Applications with Water." Mike is the co-creator of the Water language, which brings a fresh and powerful approach to building web applications in particular, and to programming in general. Water unifies many of the disparate technologies that are commonly used together, making it easier to manage complex problems and build effective solutions. Mark your calendars to learn more about Water on May 20 - I look forward to seeing you there! All the best, -- Dan Jacobs, Chairman ------------------------------------------------------------------- Building Web Services and Applications with Water Water is a new object-oriented, dynamic language that dramatically simplifies building Web services and applications. It unifies the worlds of OO and Web Services. XML becomes more than an extensible markup language -- XML turns into an executable modeling language. During the seminar, Mike Plusch will create at least 10 services and applications from scratch without using any GUI tools. He'll talk about some of the problems of XML -- such as verbosity and ambiguity -- and show how ConciseXML and Water solve those problems. Water uses an XML-based syntax called ConciseXML which is compatible with XML 1.0 and is as concise as popular programming languages. Water represents the first Pure Web Services environment where everything is a Web Service and has an XML representation. Water makes Web Services and XML live up to their promise. Water adheres to a "Learn Once, Use Everywhere" philosophy where data, logic, and presentation are manipulated and represented in a consistent way. Water is an All-Level Language because it can be used for both high-level and low-level tasks. The language specification is openly documented and a free runtime is available for commercial and non-commercial use. The Water runtime can be deployed in any or all tiers of a standard Java environment -- running as an applet, servlet, or stand-alone application. Water can be used for building high-performance multi-tier applications through the caching of both data and logic. Water is particularly suited for building high-level languages. Water has started to be used by independent software vendors (ISVs) to build custom languages for specific problem domains. Water supports a flexible Object-Oriented security model called Capability Security. This is the same security model used in secure operating systems. The design of Water was influenced by many other languages such as Scheme, Java, HTML, Lisp, Self, Smalltalk, Basic, ML, and Dylan. Water has the power of Lisp, and the ease of use of Basic. ---- About the speaker: Mike Plusch is the co-creator of the Water language. Mike wrote a book titled Water: Simplified Web Services and XML Programming [Wiley, 2003]. He also co-authored a chapter titled "Static and Dynamic Semantics" in the book "Spinning the Semantic Web" [MIT Press, 2003]