Software: DSLs Lead Development Paradigm Shift; domain-specific languages

DSLs Lead Development Paradigm Shift
eWeek (03/26/08) Taft, Darryl K.

The software development community needs to move beyond its use of static, procedural languages and frameworks and start using language-oriented programming. ThoughtWorks senior application architect Neal Ford, speaking at TheServerSide Java Symposium on March 26, says domain-specific languages (DSL) are designed for specific tasks. Ford says ThoughtWorks colleague Ola Bini envisions a future stack of basic programming tools consisting of a "stable language" at the bottom level, with dynamic languages built on top of that, and DSLs added at the top layer. Ford says that DSLs improve the software development process by "eliminating noise," and that programmers experienced in dynamic languages tend to build DSLs on top of their low-level language. "Using DSLs evolves the way we build and use frameworks, escalating our abstraction levels closer to the problem domains and farther from implementation details," Ford says.
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Software: Java Is Becoming the New Cobol

Java Is Becoming the New Cobol
InfoWorld (12/28/07) Snyder, Bill
Java is becoming less popular with developers as many are switching to Ruby on Rails, PHP, AJAX, and Microsoft's .Net to develop rich Internet applications. Many developers feel that Java slows them down. Peter Thoneny, CEO of Twiki.net, which produces a certified version of the open source Twiki wiki-platform software, says Java promised to solve incompatibility problems across platforms, but the different versions and different downloads of Java are creating complications. Ofer Ronen, CEO of Sendori, which routes domain traffic to online advertisers and ad networks, says languages such as Ruby offer pre-built structures such as shopping carts that would have to be built from scratch with Java. Zephyr CEO Samir Shah says Java's user-interface capabilities and memory footprint simply do not measure up and put it at a serious disadvantage in regards to mobile application development. Nevertheless, developers and analysts agree that Java is still going strong in internally developed enterprise apps. "On the back end, there is still a substantial amount of infrastructure available that makes Java a very strong contender," Shah says.
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