Monday, February 12, 2007

BASIC and Web 2.0

Run BASIC has been called a Web 2.0 BASIC by several people now. I have been pretty much avoiding that classification (lately) because I don't think it meets that description, yet.

One idea that is important for Run BASIC to be a Web 2.0 system is that it needs to be able to consume information from other internet sources. The ability for the user to write a program that downloads the contents of a web page and then process that as information, or the ability to read RSS feeds as data would get us partway there.

I'd be interested in the reader's thoughts about this (yes, you!).

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm not sure what you mean by "consume information from other internet sources". To me, the most important thing to be useful is to interact with HTML like ASP,ASP.NET, Perl, Python, etc. Thus, a mod_basic for apache using Run Basic.

Or maybe I'm stuck in the previous web. Maybe a web application could be written without HTML, but I don't see how.

Carl Gundel said...

Being an invention of the web itself, it makes sense that Run BASIC should be able not only to produce web content (in the form of programs or perhaps even static pages), but that it could also consume other content on the web. You know, input and output. ;-)

As for HTML, ASP, JSP, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. You don't need those to create a web app using Run BASIC. Since you can embed your own tags in the output of Run BASIC programs there is no reason why you cannot use Run BASIC with all those other things.

Think about it.

Stephen Wrighton said...

personally, I think it's an interesting idea.

And Tom - IMO, it would be less useful to interact with HTML than it would be for Run Basic to interact with data streams - such as XML, SOAP, or JSON.

Now, the output of a Run BASIC applet can/should be HTML/XHTML for viewing in a browser, but I have to wonder how much quicker a Run BASIC implementation of an XML Parser for say a product catalog would be compared to the .NET or RAILS implementation.

That said, there are other tools out there that are designed to consume those resources, RAILS, .NET, etc. how would a Run BASIC solution stack up to them?

Likewise, what overhead on the server would it garner - especially when there are thousands of requests against the app at any given time.