Monday, September 14, 2009

From Oz QTk to QHTML to QCurl

The QTk framework for the Oz programming language provides a mixed declarative and procedural approach to generating a GUI using Tk. Since the appearance of QTk, the QHTML framework appeared first as a research report and then in the SCM for Oz.

In going through the QHTML Oz code it became apparent almost immediately that transitioning QHTML to QCurl would be even less problematic than my current efforts with Smalltalk Seaside for Curl.

A QCurl framework should address one or two challenges that faced QHTML and move closer to a framework involving the fewest number of disjoint languages: in this case, only Oz and Curl. With Oz on the server-side and Curl on the client-side we have a mixed declarative-functional-procedural language on each end, plus the advantage of Curl macros. With the Curl JIT compiler producing native code and consuming declarative Curl as a data format, Oz can expect excellent performance with an alternative to HTML+JavaScript+CSS while also not being restricted to the web browser as the GUI container.

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