Evolving from Foxpro
A while ago I made a big push to convert all the user interfaces to HTML. It was tricky because what I do is to host the interfaces in the _webbrowser while running on the desktop and the same interfaces run through the web. Works great and I can't believe more people aren't into that approach. The other benefit of HTML interfaces is caching, I built a web server into the app so that it can be run as a service and users can access the app across the network. Performance is great.
For desktop apps, I am hoping that 64bit platforms hopefully won't affect my apps too much, I have heard that I should be able to run the app in the 32bit compatible mode (which I haven't tried yet). Run as a COM server I am able to pull the HTML interfaces into .Net. So I can also have a '.Net' frontend when it is a corporate requirement for installation at some sites.
I can write in C# and C++ but in my mind they are not what I would use for writing business type applications. Strong typing is great in it's place but it is annoying as hell when all I care about is building a business rule. VB.Net might be alright to do the job as well, but I am very wary of being locked into a proprietory language again.Enter the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) layer for the .NET.
Since the DLR acts as a layer on top of the CLR, dynamic languages that leverage the DLR will have full access to .NET programming libraries written in other languages like C#. So I have the access to other languages when I want them. But the DLR is also supporting non-proprietory languages (Ruby, Python, Javascript).
I am having a good look at Python. I have the skills to use Javascript but Python has an enormous number of support libraries already existing for anything I could want to do with it. It seems better suited to backend processing. I have been a MS shop through and through, so until recently any open source language wasn't going to be an option .... until I read about IronPython and .Net. MS has employed the guy that was heavily involved in Jython (Python on Java) to write IronPython, which is Python in .Net, and made it open source!! Apparently IronPython will run in Silverlight as well. God, another language right, that's all I need, but the more I look at it the closer to Fox it seems.
Related, but separate, is that I am starting to take Google's offerings seriously. Google is doing some revolutionary things that may have very big implications for programmers. What's that got to do with Python? Google has the guy employed that wrote Python, and Python is core to their web applications, and now MS has their own version of the language. That is job security, I think.
So the pathway forward will be to take the business rules and convert them to run in Python. They will probably be written in IronPython, though apparently there are implementations of Python that can be accessed through the MS script control. (Also through ASP pages). This code will be triggered to run from the serverside code in the HTML interfaces. The cursor record is converted into an object and passed into Python for business processing. Hopefully, this code will be generic enough to run in Google web apps as well.
Performance? Check this out ... "IronPython already provides better run-time performance than the conventional C-based Python implementation in some contexts, and, in an interview with eWeek, Microsoft developer Jim Hugunin claimed that the eventual goal for IronPython is to achieve performance that is 'at least two times faster than the native C-based implementation.'"
At the end of the day I have to ask ... what if cloud computing ends up the winner? Am I going to have to rewrite again? I have my own personal reasons for believing that cloud computing has compelling reasons for it to be a serious competitor to the desktop. I have been a loyal MS adherent for many years, but I don't know why MS didn't implement the Fox onto the DLR when they obviously have the ability. It really ticks me off, this is the second time in my career when corporate decisions have led to a language I am using being killed. So no more lock-in, the 'suits' should not control computer languages, it is Javascript & Python for me.
With the new implementation of Python (3000) not being backward compatible with earlier versions, now might be a good time to start to seriously look at the language as it has just had a major overhaul.
