Aules evolve

Over at my Aule blog I have a post on evolving an Aule as a "home page" - but one that it is with me and not at Yahoo or Google or AOL.

For some time it has been my habit to set the browser home page to a file on my PC or netbook by using an address bar entry of

file:///c:/webpages/home.html

or

file:///home/grs/websites/home.html

but those should soon go to being

aule.html

or

aule.curl

or

aule.dcurl

as Aules evolve towards being user-defined entry points with access to

remote-astronomy_aule.html

and such.  I had hoped to use a variant of Seaside for Smalltalk to generate these "pages" and another   Squeak Smalltalk framework to make them both portable and persistent.  I am now leading more towards using Robert Parlett's new variation on the Icon language and its libraries as ObjectIcon.  And in time there may be Laurie Tratt's Converge.

Two largely ignored programming options still hold my interest: the Logtalk framework for Prolog (swi-prolog is both constraint and RDF-friendly) and Oz (rules, constraints, dataflows ... )

As Smalltalkers know, it is not just the language, it is the environment, the established patterns - and the ease of testing and debugging.  I will still keep an eye on Seaside for Pharo Smalltalk and watch for Dolphin+Lesser's NG Smalltalk.  But an Aule layout keeps coming back to being a structured String specification to be parsed, persisted and built.  Rebol3 looks to be mired-down (the latest distraction for Carl Sassenrath is running his alpha on an Amiga before that alpha has stumbled into a first beta.  Oh vey ... ) and don't hold your breath for an environment.

Parsing in Icon is almost as fine as in Rebol - and there remains in my back pocket the Qtk for Oz.

No option will be as elegant as a declarative Curl UI in a web page - so they will continue - but as an option.  My next iterations are for Tcl and Ruby links over at logiquewerks.com because the Tcl aule (entry point, home page, portal, mashup) must itself evolve as Tcl 8.6 and TclOO become old-hat.  And Ruby may yet get cleaned up.  And then Java 7 and a VisualWorks 8.  And oh yes - a Rebol 3.