Blogs

Each year O’Reilly publishes on their blog a State of the Computer Book Market analysis. It is an excellent indicator of computer programming language trends. Geeks love their books and programming geeks adorn their desks with as many reference books as possible. Despite living in a hyper connected world we cannot risk even one moment without access to the more obscure and arcane intricacies of our chosen languages and toolsets.

And Ruby is cleaning up: officially recognized as a “Mid-Major Programming Language”. And in good company too with Visual Basic and ActionScript.

Perhaps its the growing body of knowledge or perhaps its just the beauty and simplicity of the language itself. Probably a little bit of both. Its nice to see such a fun and rewarding environment growing into the hearts of the mainstream. We love Ruby here at Nitobi and we have grown a good number of Ruby projects and expertise. With Java and, soon, .NET support we’re looking forward to bringing Ruby to even more places. And adding more books to our shelves!

Keeping with the rich client times, I was having a quick look at the brand new JavaFX scripting language and came across some really interesting additions.

JavaFX is declarative and statically typed but from the examples feels very terse. It reads quite naturally. I like it.

Creating guis with swing for example:

Frame {
    content: Button {
        text: "Press Me"
        action: operation() {
            System.out.println("You pressed me");
        }
    }
    visible: true
}

Neat. Clean, and dare I say, easier to read than markup. I remember a really smart guy I know proposing a similar approach for declaritive user interfaces recently. Eh Dave? =)

It gets better, Arrays get some much needed love in the form of XPath and XQuery syntax additions. I love how this reads:

var nums = [1,2,3,4]; // just a regular array
insert 5 into nums; // yields [1,2,3,4,5] woah!
var numsGreaterThanTwo = nums[. > 2]; // yields [3, 4, 5]

Beautiful!

Great things happening for user experience focused developers with more options than ever before. Things are heating up with Flex, JavaFX and possibly Silverlight seeking to rule the next web. I’ll be sticking with Ajax for the time being but I’m really enjoying how this is all playing out. XPath and XQuery treatment for non xml structures, eh.. hmmm.