June pdxfunc: Functional Programming With Dynamic Languages

Monday's topic for the Portland Functional Programming Study Group (pdxfunc) has been announced. The meeting will take place Monday, June 9, 7pm, at CubeSpace on Grand Avenue.

Please join us at the next meeting of pdxfunc, the Portland Functional Programming Study Group. The group meets monthly for presentations, demos and discussions. We welcome programmers interested in all functional languages, and the meetings feature content for coders of all skill levels. If interested, please subscribe to our mailing list at

http://groups.google.com/group/pdxfunc

PRESENTATION:

Title: Functional programming with dynamic languages

Summary: Dynamic, multi-paradigm languages such as Ruby, Python and Perl allow programmers great flexibility in how they can write their code, although most use an imperative (AKA "procedural") style. However, using a functional style selectively can help provide clearer and shorter code, reduce bugs, and improve performance. This presentation will provide a basic overview of functional programming, sample code demonstrating how to use functional programming features of dynamic languages, compare and contrast code samples of functional and imperative styles, and discuss when each style is appropriate. No previous knowledge of functional programming is necessary.

Bio: Igal Koshevoy is a Business-Technology Consultant with over a decade of experience creating sophisticated, business-critical systems using open source technologies. He is the author of an open source server automation toolkit available at "automateit.org", and supports local community efforts through Calagator, Portland Ruby Brigade, Portland Functional Programming Study Group, Legion of Tech, Ignite Portland, etc.

See you there!

PS: Sorry for the short notice, but Kevin's talk on XML parsing with Haskell had to be delayed. Hopefully he'll be able to present it next month.

Microsoft Wants To Give You A Vulnerable Flash

From Steve Loughran...

SANS is issuing an emergency warning that XP SP3 installs a version of flash with security holes, even over a later version.

And you use Windows, again, why?

Acrobatics

News from Adobe today, heading in the direction they were talking about last year for PDF and Flash. PDF is an open standard. I don't know how that spec-wise matches what it takes for Adobe to incorporate SWFs into Reader, techno-wise, and stuff...

Two big announcements today. One, we’re announcing Reader 9 which includes the ability to render SWF content inside of your PDF. That means you can actually put Flash/Flex content directly into created PDFs. That opens up a lot of very, very interesting use cases like exposing form entry applications right inside of the document or starting to use a lot of video content inside of your PDFs. I think this is one of the more interesting things to happen with the Adobe/Macromedia merger. With PDF’s right’s management built in, this also provides you a way to protect your SWF content from being decompiled.

The second announcement, my favorite of the day, is that we’re rolling out Acrobat.com. You’ve seen a lot of the services in different parts of the web, but we’re finally bringing them together under one umbrella brand with one account and a lot of functionality. You get Buzzword, “Share”, and “Brio” all as part of Acrobat.com and the line between the online software and the desktop software is starting to blur. For instance right from the Adobe Reader menus you can create a new Buzzword document or start a collaborative meeting in “Brio” which as been named Connect Now. Your Buzzword documents can now export to PDF and you can use Share to both create PDFs from documents as well as make it easy to send them to friends or embed them on your blog. There’s even an Acrobat.com AIR widget that lets you drag and drop files and create PDFs from them.

I think it's cool. And another set of signs that Adobe "gets" some things competitors either don't get or have not figured out how to execute on successfully. This is all good news for "the office" and multiple offices working together over the internets. Not to mention education, entertainment, and everything else.

Also, via Mike Chambers today, a bunch of useful reference guide stuff from Adobe re: RIA and ActionScript.

I don't know. Maybe I am just an Adobe "fan boy" so to speak. I think they're doing a lot of things well.

Toward Better UI Programming Models

Every now and then I complain about the browser's programming model. There's just been better models in the past on desktops, and there must be a ways forward that (1) "don't hurt the web" [see below] and (2) provide at least the ease of the popular models of the past. Most of the popular models of the past are based on some variation of Model-View-Controller from Smalltalk-80... frameworks like Swing, MFC, etc.

Those models are still incredibly low level compared to other practical-yet-relatively-unknown models that evolved over the last 30 years or more. Most of these other models that I can recall are all in the ballpark of contraint-based and data-flow-based systems.

Here are some off the top of my head for interested readers, many of whom I suspect may *only* have client-side experience with HTML and AJAX if they are younger than a certain age, maybe 35? I'll fill out links and descriptions as I get time.

• ThingLab - And subsequent constraint solvers that came out of Alan Borning's groups for Smalltalk, Java, C, etc. (Many developers are familiar with contraints for layout, less familiar with constraints used within domain model and GUI integration. For a recent discussion on contraints in layout see: Michael Lucas-Smith, Vassili Bykov, Andres Valloud)
• Alternate Reality Kit (ARK) - Smalltalk
• Morphic - originally influenced by ARK and implemented in Self, then in Squeak Smalltalk, and now Lively Kernel in Javascript.
• Fabrik
• Hypercard (on this list for its unique simplicity as opposed to its programming model per se)
• Garnet - CommonLisp, read the papers and try the system if you can - great stuff.
• Amulet - Garnet's C++ successor, a bit more clunk but available to more programmers
• EZDraw - Joel Bartlet's Scheme->C system
• Figlets - Haskell
• Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) (data-flow-ish) systems like: FrTime (PLT Scheme), Frappe (Java), Flapjax (Javascript), and various Haskell systems.

Please Don't Hurt The Web

I don't think HTML and AJAX should or could go away any time soon. But I don't think all "clients" have to be entirely (or at all) made of HTML and AJAX. The more RESTful the web becomes the less clients have to consist of HTML and AJAX. That's a big reason I like AIR so much: HTML and AJAX can contain other models like Flex and PDF; and Flex can contain HTML and AJAX; RESTful services can be integrated into any of this; and so on.