Steve, Helma and the second coming of NBL


Quick update first: The draw2d figure connections routing now works. It was my fault as always ;) The save/load cycle is 90% done and only needs some quick touches to really swipe things everywhere when loading and really initialize everything while loading. I can finally start to work with it as a tool now, which is great.

Concerning Google, I cannot comment at the moment what is happening or not except to say that Zürich is a surprisingly nice and friendly city and Zooglers are a cool bunch of people.

Now for todays piece of information. Nobody in their right mind should have missed Steve Yegges announcement at Foocamp that he was basically porting ruby on rails to JavaScript - on the server side. Yikes! It seems that the server side language and framework I had been hoping for is already being made.

Today Joh Resig mentioned an exisiting js serverside framework called Helma.
I know that the Sun guys are already working hard on the Phobos project, which also is a java-contained js framework. The problem I have with Phobos is that it technically feels like going back seven years to JSP pages, including horribly mixing of code and presentation.

What's really, really cool with Helma is that it contains a js object-db abstraction layer. See above for a picture from their site.

Like a true coincidence I happen to be at the point where I'm starting to choose an export target for components generated in the composer. Also, one of my future musings include a visual editor for creating server-side objects, and for generating CRUD forms from them. Kind of makes you think. Hmmm :)

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