While I am busy working on Liberty BASIC v5.0, my development partner Scott is working on something fun on the side. We are working on a dynamic web front end to Liberty BASIC so that you can write web programs in LB. We have some ideas for a unique tool for web programming that doesn't require all the crazy bits and pieces that are needed for the mainstream web solutions.
This will be an all-in-one solution with its own web server and it can be hosted behind Apache if so desired. We hope that in a month or so we will have a neat demo site up with some example pages that show how it works.
So, there's lots going on! :-)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
It does run on Windows. Do you mean will it run behind some other web server besides Apache? I guess so.
What was really fun was when we got our first simple prototype of this system running (just the other day). I used my Treo 650 smartphone's built in web browser to access the server. I wrote a short little program and ran it. BASIC on my phone! :-)
For now we are just working on a cool web demo of a BASIC that will share much of the Liberty BASIC syntax. This BASIC will be tailored to the medium of the web, so it'll be a little different than LB, and will have it's own name. Since it will run on our server we will not provide capabilities that access the hardware like serial or port I/O. Disk I/O will be virtualized and non-persistent (it won't write to the server's file system).
Our short term motivation is to create a cool site that we can use to interest people in our desktop software (LB).
Later we may productize this in one or more forms, and we may sell a hosted service. If we do sell this as user installed server software we may provide an option for an administrator to give individuals access to hardware devices.
We'll see how it goes. :-)
Perl is a useful tool, but let me explain why this is different from what we're doing.
First of all this is about BASIC, not Perl. If you like Perl then that's great. Use it. Enjoy. ;-)
A lot of people know and like BASIC, which is a perfectly useful language. There's no reason why a nice BASIC for the web shouldn't exist.
With Perl you have to manage at least three components. Your web server, your cgi scripts (you write them using a text editor), and to use your programs you use a web browser.
What we're doing will allow the BASIC programmer to do everything in the browser. There is no concept of a remote procedure. An application with sophisticated interactive features can exist in one file, written in a very standard desktop app coding style. In other words this is going to be easy. If you think cgi programming with Perl is easy, this is going to be even easier.
Hi,
Look at my response on the main blog page. :-)
http://basicprogramming.blogspot.com
Post a Comment