On Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:21:01 GMT, Duke Normandin <dukeofperl@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
>> ....and check out the stuff we do with Cache and Mumps technology at
>> http://www.mgateway.com,
in particular for web development with
>> Enterprise Web Developer. This will hopefully give you an idea of the
>> sheer capabilities that M can give you. It's what is driving this
>> demo: http://ec2.mgateway.com
>
>Very nice indeed! So the pages are written in PHP which in turn calls
>various Mumps routines?
>
Basically, yes, but it's actually it's much more than that. EWD
consists of two parts:
- a compiler, written in Cache/M
- a run-time environment, again written in Cache/M
EWD allows you to express what you're wanting to do at a very high
level of abstraction, essentially as HTML pages that include "custom
tags" which act, in effect, as macro tags. The compiler converts
these to run-time versions in the technology you choose, eg PHP pages.
So what you're running in the demo is PHP pages that were generated by
the EWD compiler from the source EWD pages you can see in the Source
Code window.
EWD also includes custom tags that represent ExtJS widgets. EWD's
compiler converts these to the necessary Javascript that you'd
otherwise have to write in order to use those ExtJS widgets, saving
you a huge learning curve and amount of effort.
So EWD's compiler is a great example of the kind of advanced
code-generation logic you can write in Cache/M. The heart of the EWD
compiler is actually an XML DOM implementation + HTML/XML parser, all
implemented natively in Cache/M, with the DOM structure modelled in
globals.
At run-time, the PHP pages are invoking so-called "pre-page scripts"
and "action scripts" which are Cache/M code that fetch the data from
your Cache/M database for each page and then validate and save the
data back again to the database if required. The EWD run-time
environment automates and orchestrates all that run-time linkage
between PHP and the Cache/M back-end.
Finally, the session, state and security management are all managed
automatically for you by the EWD run-time environment, again all
within Cache/M. Unlike standard PHP pages, EWD-generated ones use
Cache/M as the session database, once again making use of globals as a
very high-performance and scalabale architecture for session
management.
So hopefully this quick overview of EWD gives you a good indication of
just how amazing the underlying M technology is. I really can't
imagine how you'd go about creating something similar to EWD in other
technologies, whereas it's actually been pretty straightforward to
build with M.
When people rave on about stuff like Ruby on Rails, my heart sinks.
Perhaps by comparison with the rest of the mainstream it's pretty
good, but what I've seen of it leaves me totally underwhelmed. If the
industry woke up and saw what is really possible with M in terms of
web development, they'd realise that they could be in a different
league altogether.
As I've said elsewhere recently, if Google's recent announcement of
their App Engine can suddenly turn a previously unknown hierarchical
database (their BigTable database) and a relatively obscure scripting
language with an unusual syntax (Python) into the next cool thing,
perhaps there's actually some hope for M !!
---
Rob Tweed
Company: M/Gateway Developments Ltd
Registered in England: No 3220901
Registered Office: 58 Francis Road,Ashford, Kent TN23 7UR
Web-site: http://www.mgateway.com
SlipstreamUSA: April 2, Renaissance Hotel, Orlando
http://www.OutOfTheSlipstream.com
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