Web 2.x Blog

Throughout time as a software engineer I have been searching for an elegant, light-weight language to quickly develop/prototype applications, but I have never had the patience to go through all the configurations that I need to get something simple up and running.

I come from a mainly Java background (though my interests lie in developing C programs and doing some hardcore scripting in a ugly UNIX looking terminal). I have learnt to build applications (not quickly) in SWING and various other Java libraries. This wasn’t a sweet process as it takes literally hundreds of lines of code just to get a functional interface up and running!!! Given the time line in the University projects, I had to use a different strategy to approach this. The traditional delegate-and-code method wouldn’t work too well even with the size of our team given the time line, and also the fact that the most of the members of the team weren’t quite verse with SWING yet. With agreement from the team, I suggested that I would developed a functional template code, in which all the other developers could then fill in the necessary gaps. In each template code, a simple example code was given with details on what it did.

Regardless, I always have some reservation about using Java to quickly produce a software with rich user interfaces. No doubt that Java is an elegant and easy to use to use language, but it is slow to develop for, especially when you are mix and matching a bunch of frameworks. Maybe it’s just the environment we had to use back then in the University to do the project (we used a UNIX terminal with just VI editor). However, I have also been using Eclipse at work to do Java coding. The amount of setup and configurations needed just to get the program up and running without any functionality is inexcusable.

This is when my search for a light-weight language-without-much-configuration begins desperately.

Tags: Rails, Ruby