It's interesting to watch the debate between Brendan Eich and Google over the merits of Google's Dart programming language.

Brendan Eich: Don’t kid yourself. Google is not just trying to “advance the web”. Putting things in Chrome that have no standard spec in progress and none in sight, pulling Chrome-only (not just “works best in Chrome”) marketing stunts, paying app developers to do Chrome-only versions, paying for opt-out bundling of Chrome (with default browser opt-out to boot, recently killed by Microsoft when the Skype deal closed). These are intentional acts.

Brendan made it sound like the big bad Google is out to break the web. Somehow I don't believe it. Why would they want to do that? And Brendan's vehement opposition to Dart (something I heard mentioned on the Twitter but never paid attention) prompted me to seek out information about it. And what do I find? This:

Improving the DOM, written by Bob Nystrom: Here's some code:

// Old: elem.addEventListener('click', (event) => print('click!'), false); elem.removeEventListener( 'click', listener);

// New: elem.on.click.add( (event) => print('click!')); elem.on.click.remove(listener);

As much as I hate web programming, I have to say that the new way of doing things feels better than the old. I can't imagine lovers of web programming would oppose such an improvement to the web programming landscape.

Brendan's argument against Dart is a political one: Dart is bad because Google will be putting it unilaterally into their own Chrome browser and they are not even trying to submit it as a standard. And even if they did, other browser vendors won't implement it, therefore Dart is a dead-end.

But isn't the crown jewel of web programming, the venerable XmlHttpRequest (aka Ajax) a proprietary mechanism unilaterally put into their own Internet Explorer browser by the big bad Microsoft?

Even Mozilla's own Firefox, contains plenty proprietary (although open source) tools that they are not intending to standardize, like XUL, that no one uses on the web.

I don't know if Dart will win at the end. But even if it loses, it deserves your support now, if only to put pressure on the JavaScript vendors to make improvements in a more rapid pace.

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on October 30, 2011 9:09:48 AM CDT #

Oracle initiated a discussion 2 days ago on the OpenJDK discuss mailing list for creating the JFX project. Hopefully this will lead to a completely open source implementation of JavaFX.

Richard Bair: Hi OpenJDK community!
As announced at JavaOne we (Oracle) would love to contribute JavaFX into OpenJDK as a new project called "JFX". For some who have been following along, we've talked about this for a long time but finally (finally!) we're ready to act on it and open source the platform. We are not just interested in open sourcing the code, however, we also want to move into an open development model. We already have an open bug database[1]. The project uses Mercurial, so we should fit in pretty well into OpenJDK.
…

Contrast this with the situation from 1254 days ago, when things were going in the opposite direction.

A big thank you to Stephen Chin for making real the community sentiment on open sourcing JavaFX.

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on October 29, 2011 10:43:33 PM CDT #

(Started at a new client last week. The first order of business of course is setting up the workspace. :) )

Somethings never change.

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on October 20, 2011 4:19:15 PM CDT #