WSGI and the Pluggable Pipe Dream | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings. Just read it to get a good overview of what WSGI actually is, what is possible with it, and where it might also get stuck.
Archive 29. July 2011
Gambas - Gambas Almost Means Basic. Ok, and now it gets really wild, but I thought after RealBasic I can't help but also link to Gambas, a kind of VisualBasic clone for various systems. Can work with different databases and different GUI libraries. And a port to OSX is now available (June 2011, so still quite fresh), which also sounds promising for the future, as Linux and Windows are already supported. And yes, I know, "real" programmers turn up their noses at things like VisualBasic, but it is very useful for quickly putting together graphical tools and is particularly interesting for occasional programmers.
TL Omnis. And another RAD old-timer - Omnis was one of the first RAD environments I played with and it was quite unusual for its time. No "real" programming back then, just GUI tools for wiring and connecting in combination with calculated fields, but these were very powerful. Very strong focus on graphical tools for various purposes (DB design, relationship management, reports, forms, etc.). It's quite amazing what you can find when you dig a bit. By the way, there is a free standard version of the environment, so you can just take a look at what it can do today.
Lazarus. I mean, how can I skip something like a free Delphi clone when I write about IDEs and RAD tools? So here's the link, there are also OSX versions of it. And it's definitely an active development project. And hey, Pascal was my first high-level language after Basic when I started programming. Oh, and there's a pretty solid bridge to the Cocoa frameworks with Objective Pascal. Update: wow, that brings back nostalgia! Building command-line tools in Pascal! And the IDE isn't bad at all, it can do a lot!
I didn't know HyperNext Studio at all. A HyperCard clone for Mac, with which you can also create Windows applications. However, the last version is a bit older, I don't know if it still runs with Lion. Meanwhile, it is freeware (though closed source, I guess because their last version is already a bit older). And also interesting: it offers two languages, one that is modeled after HyperTalk and RBScript, an object-oriented Basic from Realbasic (another IDE for OSX and Windows). I guess HyperNext itself might be programmed with Realbasic. Oh, and with the HyperNext Android Creator you can also build Android applications with HyperNext. The Android Creator is however paid (but not really expensive with 60 dollars). And unfortunately, it is only available for Windows, not for the Mac. Update: those who have Lion can forget about playing with HyperNext Studio, because it is PowerPC code, and there is no Rosetta in Lion. So the maximum OSX version is Snow Leopard.
Whalesong: a Racket to JavaScript compiler. Haven't had a link to the best Scheme implementation on the net for a long time. Okay, Racket is no longer called Scheme, but there is still a lot of Scheme in it. And now there is Whalesong, a backend that produces JavaScript from Racket code - and can even generate standalone HTML files that run directly in the browser.
WebKit in PyQt - rendering web pages. Since I'm once again pondering GUI libraries and tools and playing around with Python and Qt, I should of course not forget the WebKit integration of Qt, which is really beautifully simple to implement, as these rather simple examples show. And the Qt interfaces under OSX are not 100% like native applications, but already much better than those of GTK. And you can then also run your code on other systems without much effort. The blog has even more very interesting small articles about Python and Qt.