As long as this stays in the browser, and is not also used server-side, I don't think there's much to worry about. Since it's designed to be Java like, I suspect most developers would opt to use server-side Java, and this in browser. This probably won't change.
It’s only $50,000 but surely everyone making real web apps can afford that. It’s a rounding error compared to what you’re paying Sun for your server hardware.
I looked at PHP/FI for my own homepage before, but it's really nothing more than a rudimentary template language, a slightly more powerful version of httpd's Server Side Includes. Rasmus (the developer) seems to be quite happy with keeping it simple. Perhaps you'll be lucky and he'll change his mind and convert it to a full scripting language. Heh, maybe we'll even get two frustrated undergrad students who hate Perl to rewrite the parser so they can use it to write their computer science project. Maybe you'll even be very lucky and somebody will decide to write a popular system for writing web journals in PHP/FI that would take over the world (but how many people would be so self-absorbed as to maintain a web journal anyway).
And you still don't have the database and hardware side covered. PHP/FI seems to support mSQL. mSQL is cheap for commercial use, but still not free, and it doesn't even support JOINs! And you also need a server. You also need a server. httpd used to be cool, but NCSA is no longer maintaining that. There's a serious of patches running around, so you could just run a patchy version of httpd, but how far will that take you? Next you need a proper OS to run that thing on, but while we're all waiting for GNU Hurd, there's a guy from Finland who made a free *nix OS that's been gaining quite some traction recently. These Scandinavian guys are full of surprises. Maybe you'll be lucky again and there's yet another guy in Finland waiting to unleash a free software SQL database with joins, who knows.
I don't know if you've heard of CPAN - it was introduced less than 2 months ago (October '95) and it's fantastic: you can browse and download modules off the world-wide web without hunting down tarballs on obscure FTP servers! The number of Perl modules on CPAN is growing daily! Any functionality a webmaster may want can be achieved using Perl CGI scripts - I highly recommend the latest CGI.pm (v2) whixhbyou can get from CPAN
Just put an animated mailbox icon on your home page that hyperlinks to a form page. Put the usual <INPUT> and <TEXTAREA> elements for "from", "subject", yada-yadda-yadda...
Then put in "hidden" type <INPUT> form elements for the "to" value. Totally make sure to make it hidden!
Add a submit button, and bada-bing, you're all set!
You can even send messages to your pager! Check the manual that came with it.
[outside of kayfabe, Java was really first released in May 1995, only a few months before this press release, and was mostly used for applets and desktop applications (building a web browser!) - server side usage came a while later]
It looks like this is exactly what they intend to do at some point. From the article:
> A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly.
I don't see how this would work, tbh.
I’ve been playing around with this new language called Python. The indenting syntax takes a little getting used to, but the code is way more readable than Perl. Just be sure to set indent-tabs-mode: nil if you use Emacs.
If you figure out how to write an AppleScript program to munge the Unix and Windows scripts, let me know. Manually fixing them in BBedit is getting to be a real drag.
JavaScript is obviously meant as a glue language. Component-based programming is quickly replacing binary files as the method of deployment with technologies like CORBA and COM (the base technology for OLE 2.0). Java Applets are Java's answer to portable, client-side UI component. But in order to integrate them with a static web page or with each other you need some glue code, and this is where JavaScript stands: write reusable components that unleash the full power of Java, and tie them up together using JavaScript glue code.
I expect that in the near future Sun will introduce a server-side component model to accompany Java applets. It'd be cool if they use some coffee-related name for that, idk, maybe Java Beans? This is going to revolutionize servers and everybody is going to throw away their cgi-bin/ folder with hacky perl scripts and move to components. Think about it! Instead of writing your own code, you can wire up mature components developed, each developed by an industry leader:
- Advanced Forms Applet by Microsoft - Server components for converting submitted forms into Excel spreadsheets, also by Microsoft - Database client developed by Oracle - Automatic stock ticker from Bloomberg - Integrated website search from Lycos - News applet from CNN
Sun is graciously aware of the great danger posed by the first company on this list, but in their great foresight they are going to define generic interfaces for every common type of component, and insert clauses into their license that will allow them to sue companies which try to extend these interfaces in an anti-competitive manner. Now, if you want to switch from Excel to Lotus 1-2-3 or from Oracle to Sybase or Informix you're also free to do so. The same goes for your OS, as all Java components are fully platform-independent. This is truly the future!
But why create a new language just for the browser? It clearly makes more sense to use Java in both the server and the browser. We could write little Java applications inside the browser; say we call them "applets"?
I'm kind of breaking the immersion here, but I'm quite sure at some point Netscape was selling a Javascript powered web server.
1. http://www.java.sun.com/products/archive/hotjava/index.html
I saw that link elsewhere in this thread after my reply, and I also thought that this might have been what was being referred to.