Wednesday, December 25, 2002

Finally the Frontier IDE is also an excellent CREOLE. That' s one of the main reasons I enjoy it that much to develop applications with Frontier. Actually I use three different languages inside of Frontier day by day. The three programming languages are UserTalk, AppleScript and since a year especially JavaScript. It still makes me wonder why nobody else but me has realized that Frontier really takes programming in JavaScript to a next level. Thanx to Latenights JavaScript OSA it is very easy to embed JavaScript into Frontiers ODB. The disadvantage is that all this just works under Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. All this becomes even more interesting because Apple has decided to implement JavaScript as a first class scripting language to automate applications of future Max OS X Versions. Sherlock 3 already uses an SDK that is based on the before mentioned JavaScript-Engine. If you want to know more about replacing AppleScript with JavaScript to automate the Mac read this O'Reilly article. 10:58:33 PM

Do you remember these guys who intended to clone Frontier ? Obviously they gave it up already, in 1999. When this happened it was really very funny. The project was called CASBAH . The most beautiful thing about this project I still remember very well was this specific part of their software they called 'CREOLE' (CREOLE Runtime Environment for Open Language Extension). Sooooo charming! Which reminds me to mention another star sparkling project called Minotaur for Perl, Python, and Tcl.The initial implementation involves Perl, Python , and Tcl , but basic bindings have been set up for Java , Lua , PHP , and potentially any language that is designed to be able to be embedded inside something else. Minotaur is based on pForth, and embeds one scripting language, "inside" the other at runtime, using Forth as the "superglue" that implements callbacks to get back into the other language interpreter at runtime. As far as I know this afford ended also in 1999. 6:19:02 AM