Blue Sky On Mars

There’s a new language that is soon to be open sourced called Newspeak. Gilad Bracha and team are creating a new language to address what they see as the future of programming (online/offline operation, lots of service oriented design, more concurrency). They’re angling for a Smalltalk-like environment and, indeed, their current implementation is in Squeak.

Ignoring that there’s at least one other language called Newspeak, it seems like Gilad Bracha’s Newspeak is built on reasonable premises. You can read a bit about what Newspeak is like. Newspeak is definitely not done yet, but things like this give me some doubt:

note that the caret (ˆ) is used to indicate that an expression should be returned from the method, just like the return keyword in conventional languages

If I were creating a programming language, writing a sentence like that would give me pause. I would ask myself “why am I doing this differently?” If everyone in the world is using return, why choose ^? To save a few characters of typing? Really? The Newspeak document does not explain why it’s like that, it just states matter-of-factly that ^ means return.

Though they reference Self as an influence for Newspeak, they chose to go with classes rather than prototypes. That’s a good decision for adoption, because people are familiar with and like classes.

Anyhow, I think Newspeak looks interesting and it will be interesting to see how it matures. But too many arbitrary changes from “conventional” syntax are likely to hinder adoption.

My latest blog post is up on the SitePen blog:

Mark Ramm-Christensen posed some questions about using the JVM as a platform for dynamic languages. Many people do, in fact, use dynamic languages on the JVM (Groovy, Beanshell, Rhino, Jython, JRuby are some big ones… and don’t forget Scala, Nice and other “non-dynamic” languages that target the JVM). But Java the platform has not gotten widespread or serious attention until recently (witness the recent resurgence of Jython, the rise of JRuby and the coming of the Da Vinci Machine).
[From Why Java remains the most popular language on the JVM]

Answering the question “Why Java remains the most popular language on the JVM” gives clues as to what might be the next most popular language on that platform.

Alex Russell picked out a few great highlights from the new Dojo 1.1 release and has a nice little essay on open source to boot:

I could go on for a long, long time about what’s great in Dojo 1.1…but I’ll spare you most of that. James, Pete, Dylan, and the release notes can give you a strong sense of why Dojo 1.1 is the most polished, fastest, and easiest-to-use release of Dojo we’ve ever done. For the impatient, you can already start using it from the CDN without downloading anything.
[From Continuing Intermittent Incoherency » Dojo 1.1: Some Awesome For You App]

Dojo is reaping the rewards of having spent a lot of time getting their infrastructure together. 1.1 really improves so many parts of the package.

(ObDisclaimer: I’m not directly involved in the Dojo project myself, but I work directly with core Dojo folks at SitePen.)

I don’t know if this preannouncement comes as a result of all of the Google App Engine publicity, but here it is: Amazon Web Services Blog: Storage Space, The Final Frontier. In a nutshell: AWS now lets you create a storage volume of 1GB to 1TB that can be mounted in one EC2 instance and will persist beyond the lifetime of an EC2 instance. As an added bonus, you can have automatic snapshots of your volume plunked into S3.

They say that this storage is a low-latency, high-throughput block device. So, you can run all kinds of traditional software on top of it.

This will change the competitive outlook a bit between AWS and GAE a bit, because it makes it easier for people to use all of the software pieces that they’re used to when they use AWS to manage the hardware infrastructure. This means that it’s easier to take your existing apps and skills and get them up on AWS. GAE has a fight ahead in terms of getting people to write their apps differently… but the benefit to doing so is that you no longer think of hardware infrastructure at all.

Isn’t quoting out of context great:

I hate computers.
[From Ian Bicking: App Engine: Commodity vs. Proprietary]

More seriously, though, in saying “I hate computers”, Ian is actually talking about the opposite of being a Luddite. He’s dreaming of a world in which much of computing just works in the background, so that we can spend our time doing more important and interesting things in the foreground.

I’m linking to Ian here because he’s said exactly what I have been thinking about App Engine: from a Python programming perspective the APIs are simple and clear. I can easily imagine a ZODB-based implementation of Google’s data store API. Just change your imports, and you can be off of Google’s infrastructure and on to your own.

Of course, for a great many people there won’t be any reason to be off of Google’s infrastructure. App Engine is just so darn easy. Amazon Web Services is impressive because it makes scalability affordable and available. App Engine interests me because, for its broad-but-still-limited set of use cases, it makes scalability a no brainer. “Build your app like this, and you never have to think of scaling” is a nice thought. I’ve been around enough to know that people using App Engine will still have to think of scaling some, but not nearly as much as with just about any other solution.

Back to the lock-in aspect, though. I still see App Engine as likely to be utterly unsuccessful with large businesses. That is, until a new Google Appliance comes out. I’ve been predicting such a beast since Google Docs was first introduced, and I think App Engine makes it all the more likely. I still believe that there will come a time when Google will sell boxes to big companies that those companies can toss into some racks on their networks and deploy App Engine apps locally, as well as run Google Docs on their private nets. Things will get even more interesting at that point.

You can bet that Amazon is studying App Engine closely and considering their own high-level service as I write this. From a developer’s perspective, this competition is going to be awesome.

It occurred to me just now that Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services are only barely in competition right now. If you want an infinite storage system like AWS S3 in App Engine, you need to code it yourself (ignoring the preview limits App Engine currently has). If you want to deploy apps as easily as you can with App Engine in AWS, you need a bunch of infrastructure that AWS does not provide.

I’m happy to see that App Engine’s datastore is transactional, unlike SimpleDB. I didn’t see anything in my skim of some docs about whether App Engine has eventual consistency or if you can immediately pull out data that you stuff in. My guess is that you can immediately pull out the data you shove in. This is a win over SimpleDB, in my opinion.

App Engine is just tons higher-level than AWS. Of course, you can host anything you want in AWS. But, by trading away a bunch of that flexibility, Google has made a service that allows people to build apps that scale well with a minimum of fuss.

Google’s App Engine has been released. This is much cooler than just opening up BigTable for outside access (which is what TechCrunch reported over the weekend). One big difference between App Engine and Amazon Web Services is that the The Development Environment lets you build an app locally, including Google’s auth API and datastore. That’s very clever. You can build up an app completely and then deploy it when ready.

Or, in the case of the preview period, when you get an account… which, sadly, I didn’t. I rather wish there was a bit more information about when more developer slots will be opened. It would be a shame to create a cool app and have to sit on it for months. It would also be nice to know what pricing will look like, but given what they are giving away for free, I’m guessing it will not be unreasonable.

Overall, I’ve got to say that it looks like a great service on the surface.

Interesting rumor, and totally plausible. Just as Amazon has thought “why not make some money off of all of this great infrastructure we’ve built”, it looks like Google is going to do the same thing: Source: Google To Launch BigTable As Web Service

Google may be releasing BigTable, its internal database system, as a web service to compete with Amazon SimpleDB, according to a source with knowledge of the launch.

This will be one more non-traditional database among the many interesting choices that exist today.

Is an evolution of the Open Web in progress right now? Undoubtedly… I took a look at some of the players in Flash, Silverlight and the Open Web on the SitePen blog.

While I don’t have first hand knowledge of why Apple is doing it, I think I’ve got a pretty good idea of Why Apple is Investing in WebKit Performance.