Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

About a month ago, I considered the factors that were holding back one open source project with much potential, Parrot. Today I will do the same for another open source project: .

Earlier this week I had a very surprising and unexpected Haskell encounter! It started when a fairly large furniture shop in the area called me in to do some work on some of their intranet software.

They wanted some functionality added to their existing Web-based purchasing system. They’d mentioned that it was CGI-based, so I was thinking it was comprised of Perl or Python scripts. However, I was quite wrong! After getting access to the source code of their CGI scripts, I noticed immediately that they were all written in Haskell.

Today I had an opportunity to use NetBeans 6.0 Beta 1. Just for the record, it was used on a uniprocessor Core 2 Duo system, with 2 GB of RAM. The operating system was Ubuntu Linux, with the nVidia OpenGL drivers installed, on Sun’s 1.6 JVM. The Java 2D OpenGL pipeline was enabled, as well.

Scott Rosenberg recently wrote about how it appears to take an AJAX-based Web application about five years to mature. The examples he gives include the new Yahoo! Mail interface, as well as the new Bloglines design. But I don’t think he’s looking far enough into the situation.

Several days back I wrote about Parrot, specifically the doubts I have that it will ever be suitable for production use. A link to my article was submitted to Reddit, and it generated some discussion. From that discussion, there is one comment in particular that I would like to respond to.

Based on this article, it sounds to me like Douglas Crockford, of JSON fame, has realized the pathetic state of Web-based application development. It was quite refreshing to see an architect at a major Web firm (Yahoo!, in this case) point out the numerous and obvious flaws when using Java applets, JavaScript, XML, CSS, HTML, and AJAX for application development.

Several days back, Opera 9.50 Alpha was released. For the time being, you can read more about the new features in Opera 9.5. Some of the notable enhancements include a better ECMAscript engine, improvements to the layout algorithm, faster font rendering, and a more responsive UI.

There was some discussion at Slashdot recently about bloat-free software. Many people were giving examples such as Firefox, Opera, and GIMP. But when it comes to truly bloat-free software, I think NetBSD is a perfect example.

Necessity is part of the reason why NetBSD is bloat-free. A bloated operating system just cannot run on the wide array of vintage hardware that NetBSD supports. So bloat-avoidance is an integral part of their development philosophy.

Earlier today I was reading an article about Parrot. Parrot is, as stated on the project’s Web site, “a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for dynamic languages. Parrot currently hosts a variety of language implementations in various stages of completion, including Tcl, Javascript, Ruby, Lua, Scheme, PHP, Python, Perl 6, APL, and a .NET bytecode translator.”

Today, thanks to this article, I saw a very telling diagram giving an overview of the “Mozilla Platform”. Before you read on, I encourage you to study the diagram for a few moments.