DotCloud

Interesting article. DotCloud is a multilanguage cloud hosting service. Good Sproggler target.

Target domain: Ruby on Rails

I've tacitly been thinking about Web apps in terms of PHP and perhaps jQuery, but really, to be honest, I'd be a fool not to look at different platforms, now wouldn't I?

So here's a very interesting roadmap for learning Ruby on Rails. Here's what I like about this: it takes the semantic subdomains needed to plan (or understand) a Web app, and lays them out. A similar thing could be done for other approaches and platforms - and that result would be the semantic map for the domain.

That is what semantic programming is about.

Some thoughts circling back to semantic programming now

OK. So this declarative style of programming can be seen as the systematic laying out of the semantic structure of the program at the same time we are building the code. I'm a little worried that this structure is still very thin (that is, the extremely complex ramifications of meaning that come along with human understanding of a program are missing in this structure), but it's still a beginning.

Let's consider this: we could see the Class::Declarative structure as a sort of prototype. But knowing sufficient amounts of semantics for any given class, we could take a working structure and "compile" it into a pure-Perl structure that doesn't depend on Class::Declarative at all. In fact, we could compile it into any language for which we knew how to express the semantics of the structure.

This is important. This is what we will end up doing much, much farther down the road.

As a more proximate goal, this is what I was fumbling towards in January. I read January's posts and they seem sort of naive. I think that bodes well.

Let's posit a set of semantics that talks about databases, PHP code, Web pages, and AJAX. That's what sproggler is talking about. This declarative-plus-semantic framework would be the backbone of that system, and it could express itself using templates of some kind.

These templates are symbolic units. Remember symbolic units? They connect semantic units (the nodes in a Class::Declarative structure) with syntactic units (the pieces of code we compile), and they are mediated by templates of varying degrees of abstraction. So at some point in the very near future, we're going to want to think hard about them.

The structure of a project

You know, just having "sproggler" as a concept is focusing my thoughts. You could easily envision a Web application prototyping platform there. So ... what information would there be for any given project?

• Data schema
• Brief mission statement
• Requirements document
• Specification
• List of infrastructural components
• Basic system description
• Use cases
• Templates
• Style sheets

Each of these would be represented in an organized, standard fashion. With time I suppose you could even have a choice of methodology or something. Heh. This could be really cool.

Some links

Some things I'm finding useful:

Template Toolkit in Perl

Perl's Parse::RecDescent - actually, I'm surprised how long I lived without this one.

A little article along the way about judging C/C++ comments for readability using Parse::RecDescent and Lingua::EN::Fathom.

Then I found a bunch of stuff about PHP's session variable and how to implement login systems in PHP, some using Ajax.

I registered the domain "sproggler.com", for some nebulous future semantic-programming-online service. One probably shouldn't register speculative domains late at night.