Zac Bowling’s Blog

I’m hearing some talk about Javascript 2.0 (ECMAScript 4?). There is a page on Mozilla’s site about it. It’s amazing that we are still using Javascript 1.5. Its getting about 6 years old now. Now with everyone buzzing over getting AJAX capable sites, we really need some real and true OOP support to make this stuff a little easier. JScript .NET isn’t bad (by the way, Mono’s mjs will compile Jscript.net/Javascript code to IL if your interested). A lot of people might argue that you can emulate OOP in Javascript, and those methods of doing OOP are not that bad really, but its not so clear for some people just getting it into it. There are so many ways to do it, and just about every method lacks some key points of OOP that I really want like abstraction and type safety, although since the code doesn’t really get evalutated until runtime, it doesn’t really matter, unless we get some compile time (or pre-emptive) checking in there as well. Embedding mono into mozilla might be a solution worth looking into.

On a similar topic, I’ve been tinkering and I have come up with a working extention to our WebService classes to support XML-RPC (in addition to the already included WSDL generation and SOAP support, and the basic http POST/GET wrapping providers). I also have an update to the documentation screen to support generatting AJAX based Javascript clients for you (linkable directly in your page no less even though it needs some caching support to make it a bit nicer), similar to how we generate code samples for C# and VB, just to support more clients out of the door. My XML-RPC support is a little flaky right now (having some datetime and some array type issues on the php and perl clients I’m testing with) but since I need it for an upcomming project, I should have it working soon.

Going through the process of getting mod_mono working again on my server. I was having trouble with my distro’s shared module support, and after getting tired for the night, I started looking at how tomcat connects into apache, and I found that its not much different from the method in mod_mono. In fact 2 of the methods listed on their site will already work with mod_mono right now (mod_proxy for one). Now that mod_cache and mod_mem_cache are production quaility (according to Apache :-)) in Apache 2.2, we can now take advantage of that. Apache’s libapr (apache portable runtime) isn’t that bad after closer inspection. It provides something that most apache modules had to do on their own (like making n http request on its own or handling memory), although its not limited to just use in apache modules (I know subversion uses it for something). Might be worth looking at it for that next project.