Scripting A - Z : Presentation for Internet World December 9, 1997
Presented by Brent Noorda, President Nombas, Inc.

This is the presentation given at the Webmaster Symposium at Fall Internet World '97. The presentation was a 1-hour overview of the state of scripting today, and the expected state of scripting tomorrow. It was fun.

Agenda:

  • Overview of 3 types of programming: system, static, and scripting
    Define what scripting is, and where it belongs in the toolbox of IT solution providers (shortcut)

  • IT needs, IT solutions
    There are serious problems with traditional IT solutions; scripting solves those problems (shortcut)

  • Advantages of scripting
    Compare scripting approach with traditional system-level approaches (shortcut)

  • Comparison of scripting languages in use today
    Perl, Rexx™, JavaScript™, Tcl, Python™ (see ™ comment below), and others and where they are used (shortcut)

  • Business decision: how to choose the best language
    When is it wise to choose a scripting solution, and when is it too weak or overkill (shortcut)

  • The Future: Scripting scripting everywhere
    The who and what of scripting. What are the major players' plans. What changes are happening in the scripting world. What problems are to be tackled next. How can you be ahead of the curve. (shortcut)

  • Conclusion
    Summary. Where to go from here. List of links. Time for questions. (shortcut)

Here's the description of this session in the show schedule: In the web arena, applications based on scripts -- usually Perl and JavaScript -- predominate by an order of magnitude over system languages such as C/C++ and Java. This session for both programmers and web developers describes how to use JavaScript, Perl, Tcl, Rexx, ScriptEase, and other scripting languages to glue components and applications together for faster, safer development, and compares the popular script languages of today and tomorrow.

Caveats and disclaimers: This presentation contains links to many demonstrations. For Internet World all of the demos worked perfectly because, of course, I had my system pre-configured with just the right browser (Netscape 4.04), plugins (Tclets, ScriptEase plugin preview), and server software (SE:WSE). Chances are you don't have all of these installed and so some of the demos won't work for you. Do not let the non-working demos take away from the larger scripting message. Also, many of the demos refer to Nombas' JavaScript/ECMAScript but actually point to earlier versions of Nombas' ScriptEase/Cmm language (very close to JavaScript but not exactly). Any of these demos which have not been updated to our version 4.0 code base (the JavaScript / ECMAScript-compliant version) should be updated by the end of 1997.

™ - Many of the the language names and products discussed here, whether acknowledged with a ™ or not, are trademarks of their respective trademark holders.

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