BOA: Web Scripting In Pure HTML

Dmitry Dvoinikov writes: "I'm very excited about the web scripting language I had to learn and use with the company I currently work for. It's absolutely unknown to public, used in may be dozen of places around the world. But it's so great, I thought it deserves more publicity. So, here is the introductory article about the BOA web scripting engine. And here is its homepage if you are interested." If you know any PHP or perl, the small "hello webreaders" comparison is interesting (and Yes, favors Boa;) ).

Comments

Thanks

[Rick the Red]

Geeze, you take "older stuff" offline and the trolls vanish! "First Post" has never been this easy! Anyway, I just wanted to thank Dmitry Dvoinikov and timothy for telling me about this, and I hope to find time to read more (maybe over Christmas break :-)

(is there an award for "1st First Post"? Do I lose karma instantly, or will it take someone actually reading this and modding me down?)

Re:Thanks

[Rick the Red]

What happened to #1? What happened to my "first post"? I finally get a first post, and it's #2200142?

This is gonna make it difficult to meta-moderate those "redundant" moderations. Usually if post #284 is "redundant" you can believe them, and if post #2 is "redundant" you gotta wonder what the moderator is smoking. How am I supposed to judge the merit of calling post #2200142 "redundant"? Hmmm, I guess we gotta read the entire discussion to meta-moderate now. Maybe I just won't meta-moderate the "redundant" posts...

Re:Thanks

[Rick the Red]

If you'd read my "first post" you would see that I was posting a comment that happened to be the first post, which I remarked upon because that was a new experience for me. Usually "first post"s are by the "First Post!"ers who get there, well, first. My post was not "foiled" by the new numbering scheme, and I don't understand why you think it should have been.

If you'd read my next post, the one you replied to, you'd have seen that I was talking about meta moderation, not moderation. Do you really read the entire discussion when you meta-moderate? You do? When deciding of one moderation of one post is fair or unfair, you read the entire discussion? Really? Wow! That's dedication, and I bow to you, sir. However, I don't think that's necessary to "do it right" and I will continue to only read the relevant posts when I meta-moderate, not the entire discussion. If you disagree then you're free to hunt me down and spend your 5 moderation points trying to erase my karma to prevent my poor meta-moderation.

I still think that the new numbering system will make it harder to meta-moderate "redundant" moderation. Of course, if you really read the entire discussion when you meta-moderate then you would disagree. Show of hands: how many /.ers read the entire discussion when meta-moderating? how many read the whole thing when moderating?

Re:Thanks

[Rick the Red]

Apparantly, the new numbering scheme is intentional to prevent "First Post!" bandwidth wasters. Therefore it's not a bug to fix when the lads have free time, it's a feature for the rest of us to live with.

Apparantly there are a lot of /. readers who are not geeks and do not know how to turn on MSIE's Status Bar (clue for the clueless: it's under "View"). Therefore it's a feature for the rest of us to turn off (it's under Preferences: Comments, at the bottom).

To the /. staff: You could have mentioned this "feature", and how to turn it off, when you dumped 2.2 on us. Thanks to whoever pointed out how to disable it (in the referenced discussion, but search is down so I can't find the post).

Now, if there were only a way to hide the embeded domain names when people quote... Clue for the clueless: It flags you as a dweeb -- moreso than an aol.com email address. Not only do you not know why you don't need it (or at least how to turn it off), you don't preview your posts and thus didn't notice the embeded domain name in your quote.

(note to bendude: the above "you" didn't mean you!)

Re:Thanks

[PD]

Idiot.

The Other BOA

[MrBlack]

There is another program called BOA (also called the BOA Constructor). It's a gui builder and IDE for python (it's quite good) which can be found here. This BOA also looks cool. It seems to have all the basic requirements to be a productive web developer (db access, regex, encapsulating html object in special tags). I might give it a try.

Re:Is it just me?

[Rick the Red]

I'm getting tired of repeating myself :-) (my previous posts are somehow lost in the /. upgrade)

I disagree that BOA is limited. The "deftag" tag lets you define your own tags, and how they behave. "xoptions" allows you to add libraries of 3rd-party tags. Any language this extensible is not limited.

Re:Domain Hints

[MrBlack]

I guess it's to cut down on the www.goatse.cx crap

Re:Is it just me?

[MrBlack]

What limitations are you refering to? You'll have to be more specific. Maybe it doesn't have parametric polymorphism or multiple inheritance but it looks O.K. to me.

Well, not new, and...

[dmorin]

It seems from the article like the big selling point is that the coding is all done via tags (despite how much the author calls the "HTML tags", they're not HTML, since HTML describes the set of tags, not the syntax of tagging in the first place). Big woop, there are app server languages out there that have done this for years (such as Art Technology Group's Dynamo product). Is it XML compliant? HTML wasn't. Does it support namespaces? Internationalization? Can I define my own tags?

As always, the question is why would I want yet another language like this? Is the fact that you have to use a % sign more frequently in your JSP tags really THAT much of a big deal, given that you have all of Java at your disposal?