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A DSL based Web Framework.

After reading LtU for several years, I am ready to (tentatively) announce a (partial) release of my first programming language that I hope others to use. I am also hoping to get some feedback from those more knowledgable than I am.

WebFu is a framework that a friend and I are developing as part of our startup. It is primarily focused on PHP 5 right now, but it is applicable to web development in general, and since it is based around several compilers for several lightweight DSL's, it would be relatively easy to target other languages.

The first component we're releasing is a tool for processing and mapping querystrings and forms to user methods with a role based security system to provide a "80%" solution to simplify security auditing.

While I haven't investigated too deeply, our approach is reminiscent of Links and Google's Web Toolkit(although we were unaware of them when we started), however, I think our approach is a bit different because we're seeking to not "take over" the flow of the web app, but instead provide classes that can help provide convenient pieces of functionality.

By Matt Estes at 2006-06-10 00:38 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 6432 reads

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haXe

I would like also to mention haXe which might be of some interest for you.

By Nicolas Cannasse at Sat, 2006-06-10 19:25 | login or register to post comments

Thanks, I think I saw post a

Thanks, I think I saw post a while back, but just missed it.

However, I guess the major difference between haXe, Links, and GWT for us is that rather than a "one language" solution that generates the complete app(server and client), we have little languages(right now, 4 are planned, 2.5 are implemented, and we released 1 to the world...) that are compiled down to some classes.

I like the "one language" approach, but from an implementation standpoint, we're just two developers and had to manage the scope of our work(I guess its up for grabs whether 4 special purpose languages are easier to implement than 1 complete language). In addition, I fear many frameworks and languages suffer from Leaky Abstractions. So we decided to attack more bite sized problems that we felt we had good solutions for and represent common problems we found in web app development rather than "takeover" the whole app like many frameworks and languages.

One other benefit that we also have is that since much our code compiles down to classes in PHP that can be used in a "black box" manner, we could also retarget the compilers fairly easy to other web languages(we haven't had the need to do this yet, but targetting server-side Javascript is on the horizon, we are both big fans of Javascript).

By Matt Estes at Sat, 2006-06-10 20:43 | login or register to post comments