Building a moderately complex Web page requires understanding a whole stack of technologies, from HTML to JavaScript. Now a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has wrapped these technologies into a single language that could streamline development, speed up performance and better secure Web sites.
The language, called Ur/Web, provides a way for developers to write pages as self-contained programs. It incorporates many of the most widely used Web technologies, freeing the developer from working with each language individually.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2863069/application-development/mit-unifies-web-dev-into-a-single-speedy-new-language-urweb.html
[Related]: http://www.impredicative.com/ur/
[Source]: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/new-programming-language-coordinates-web-page-components-1223
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @11:27PM
MIT killed Aaron! NEVER FORGET MIT IS PURE EVIL.
(Score: 5, Funny) by FatPhil on Friday December 26 2014, @11:31PM
But I'm glad that MIT realised that there are too many incompatible web-frameworks out there, and therefore the only solution is to create a new unified one.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @11:33PM
... and they are done in frames. Yes, a next generation language for web development generates HTML frames. I guess Geocities was ahead of their time and just didn't know it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by q.kontinuum on Saturday December 27 2014, @12:10AM
When talking about standards, we can't omit this [xkcd.com] comic
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 4, Informative) by Bytram on Saturday December 27 2014, @09:09AM
I've seen the editors use that field as sort of a side channel to convey everything from insightful observations to wildly funny bon mots.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Saturday December 27 2014, @10:21AM
I honestly didn't notice that and googled the appropriate xkcd myself. Thanks for the hint, will read it more carefully next time :-) (Although, apparently others also overlooked it, so it probably wasn't a total waste.)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 3, Funny) by linuxrocks123 on Saturday December 27 2014, @12:27AM
Also, pure functional programming is not in my opinion a good fit for web pages.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Saturday December 27 2014, @05:58AM
At least you got to look at the thing. The ur site is completely unresponsive right now.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 27 2014, @12:35PM
The ur site is completely unresponsive right now.
That's what the Ur stands for: Unresponsive.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @11:44PM
Some asshole's pet project is news?
Never mind, I forgot this was SoylentNews where another great big asshole's pet project is Linux.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Friday December 26 2014, @11:51PM
"I have a bad feeling about this."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by anubi on Saturday December 27 2014, @01:26AM
The part that bothers me the most is:
I was so hoping one day we would get off of having embedded executables just to look at something. I am not privy to what that executable will do until I run it.
Unless I want to spend a helluva lot of time trying to decompile every web page I step on trying to figure out what it will do if I should open it up in its licensed reader.
It seems the web has become a perverse place where I obligate myself to parties by just trying to read their agreement, as their scripts execute at CPU speed while I am trying to read the damned thing at human speed.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday December 27 2014, @06:35AM
As long as the page is presented to me as JUST HTML, I don't care what they drive it with on their side.
We kind of passed the pure HTML stage some time ago, but I see no reason to add yet another layer of client side executables.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday December 27 2014, @12:28PM
Agreed ;) Linked pages of text, images, sounds, and possibly FTP type upload/download opportunities. Where nothing executes. They should do all that at the server side.
I do not want to execute *anything* from the net on my machine unless I specifically download it as an executable and knowingly ask my machine to execute it.
And even then, if it needs system functions it needs to get administrator level permissions.
I am really fed up with giving webmasters run of my machine via scripts.
And having this infrastructure so finicky your kid can ruin your machine by just trying to read pages on the web.
If I were in Congress, I would tell those SOPA guys right out that one more peep out of them about people installing ad-blockers and I will sign law to disregard all "hold harmless" clauses and hold them responsible to the same level of financial hurt as they are trying to impose on everyone else for malware carried through their scripting.
Its not the ads people are hating so much.... rather its those irresponsible webmasters and their g*d@## scripts.
SOPA and the MAFIAA are trying to have law passed to protect their interests,.
I feel its high time Congress protect our interests too by putting a stop to the big boys putting out untenable architectures by holding them responsible for their collapsing bridges,
Under the urging of the MAFIAA, Congress passed the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
We all need to urge Congress to pass some sort of Computing Infrastructure Integrity Act.
I would love to see us take note of who voted for the DMCA and ask them to push through the CIIA as well, and if not, please prepare the reason why before they step in front of the microphone for their re-election talks.
We do not tolerate our bridges falling down. We should not tolerate the kind of crap we are getting on the net either.
Even the FBI is aware of how much scammery is going on with the net. [fbi.gov] And the government is forcing us to do tax returns on the net? We are leaving ourselves wide open for scammers, and even legit communications from government is apt to be taken as a scam attempt. All this personal data in the wrong hands is going to amount to confusion on an epic scale.
I know I am probably naive, but I sure miss the old days when I could open up anything in a text editor and the worst I could possibly get was the pages of gibberish I got should I open an executable by mistake. I never had to worry about my text editor *executing* it! ( well I did have one that honored ansi codes... I got bombed, and learned my lesson - never mix code and executables. It can be convenient if I am the one doing it, but if I let others do it, no telling what kind of crap may be hiding in the text. )
The HTML viewer is the graphical extension of the plain old ASCII text viewer. It should be bolted down and secured in such a way all it can do is present text, sounds, images, and uploading/downloading files through user involvement where the user can see exactly what he is sending or getting. If they sent me just plain HTML, with no ability to hijack my machine with scripts, I would be a happy camper.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday December 27 2014, @03:52PM
Banning all client side execution is impractical, for the simple reason that there's a whole lot more computing power on the client side.
An example: I made a web page that displays chess positions. The server sends a position and a short JavaScript program to draw a pic of a chess board and pieces in that position, using vector graphics (SVG). If I have the server generate the picture whenever someone views a position, that's more work for a very low power and performance machine that really does not have the CPU cycles to spare. Static images are also impractical. However the picture is created, online or offline, it takes more bandwidth to send a pic than a small program. Even if the pic is SVG, which is typically an order of magnitude smaller than a raster image, it still takes more bandwidth. The biggest savings come from viewing many chess positions. The Javascript program is sent once, and from then on, it takes about 50 bytes to send a new position. Basically, that JavaScript program is a specialized viewer. It tells your browser how to display the data, same way that "less" tells your terminal how to display a text file.
Chess is so well known that maybe instructions for viewing positions and games should be built into browsers and the HTML standard, or maybe a plugin, or a file format, perhaps with extension ".chs" that a stand alone program included with the OS can display. Chess pieces are in Unicode, in UTF-8 from U+2654 to U+265F: ♔ ♕ , etc. A text file viewer or web browser that's up to date enough to display all UTF-8 characters could show a chess position stored in a UTF-8 text or HTML format. Wouldn't be pretty, but it could be done well enough to be usable. But there are infinitely many other sets of data that are best viewed in specialized formats.
(Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Saturday December 27 2014, @09:00PM
Let me start by conceding that implementing a custom viewer on the client side is a legitimately useful ability, and for viewing some types of data may be essential. There's naturally plenty of room to argue whether that ability is best embodied in the browser proper (javascript), in a plugin (java applet/flash), or as a standalone program (java, python, or even a native binary at the expense of platform independence).
But I do think displaying chess (or board games generally) is a very poor argument for it. Sure, generating a whole-board image server-side is bad, and relying on Unicode to have assigned code points for each piece, and on browsers to have an appropriate font, is insufficiently general. But why not an image per piece, and css for positioning them on the board? The images and css get cached and reused, and while the html document will be horribly inconcise compared to a position in JSON, most of that will compress away. I believe your way still wins on bytes-down-the-wire, but by a margin that the anti-js crowd will consider a fair price for not running random code.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Saturday December 27 2014, @10:13AM
There were two visions for the web after HTML4. One, pushed by Tim Berners-Lee and others at the W3C was the XHTML 2.0 route, where there'd be decoupling between the data and the presentation. Web sites would be front ends to web services, which would expose structured data that various different clients could query, aggregate, process, and present as the user wanted. The other, pushed by Google and embodied in HTML5, was that web sites would be dynamic things like applications that exposed information exactly as the publisher wanted.
The Google vision won, because it's easier to put ads in a program than in a structured data stream. Even in places where this isn't an issue, it's still rare to see information presented usefully for machine consumption. For example, how many TV stations publish their listings in a documented XML (or other machine-readable) format? Their entire business model revolves around getting people to watch their station, yet they regard information that makes this easier as proprietary and intentionally break screen scrapers that try to reconstruct it.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday December 27 2014, @07:03PM
Sadly accurate. 'Don't be evil' was forgotten as soon as it was written down.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 27 2014, @06:20AM
Anyone read the paper [chlipala.net]?
From the computerworld article:
Ur/Web encapsulates all the capabilities of such Web development tools within a single language [...]
For anyone still doubting the merits of this new tech, I propose having a look at Figure 1 (A Simple Chatroom Application) of the paper. It's such an improvement over having to learn several technologies like JS, HTML, SQL and their interfaces to each other.
/sarcasm
Hey, asshole, the 90's called they want their inline mess back, but I'm sure the attendees at the ACM symposium will point it out for you.
(Score: 1) by Jesus_666 on Saturday December 27 2014, @07:56AM
Bonus points for not actually solving the problem the language claims to solve. Instead of needing to know (for example) PHP, SQL, HTML, JS and CSS you now need to know Ur/Web, SQL, HTML, JS and CSS. Not that I expected anything else; a language that does what they say it does would have to be a server-side browser-side imperative declarative data manipulation markup style language that uses pretty much the same syntax for "this is a checkbox", "this element has 5em of padding on its left side", "delete all rows from table `foo` where the `bar` value is NULL" and "when this element is clicked, make this AJAX request and use the returned data to populate this other element".
Ur/Web at least tries to do some of this – that is, server-side scripting and rudimentary database structure definition. Unfortunately, this feature set is not novel in any way and both Rails and Django did it earlier and better. And don't require the user to learn a completely new language. And offer complete workflows for web development and asset management.
MIT gets an E for effort. Perhaps next they can solve application development by writing an assembler that does inline XUL.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Saturday December 27 2014, @07:15AM
http://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
Seriously, where's the script to replace me? But really though, they lost me at:
developers to write pages as self-contained programs
Given my previous posts, should I explain why?
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Saturday December 27 2014, @08:58AM
You beat me to it. I was going to post the same XKCD link after I read the summary.
If I had mod points ...
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Saturday December 27 2014, @11:41AM
I think you might have missed the previous comments [soylentnews.org] for this story
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday December 27 2014, @02:36PM
Whats with "UR" showing up more commonly now?
This has nothing to do with urbit, which is interesting although it has absolutely nothing to do with this project. Urbit is hard to describe. There's aspects of parody and aspects of real functional language and aspects of being a turing tarpit (the Intercal or BF of the mid 2010s)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 27 2014, @05:18PM
I guess that shows my ignorance. I was going to log in yesterday, and reply as one of the first posts that I am disappointed they are breaking away from the norm and saying it's YOUR web! Ur web! Not iWeb or iCloud or iSubscribe or something, but Ur! Giving the power to the little people!
I wanted to state that it was My/Web and write a script to keep the kiddies off My/Lawn...
but now that I am no longer ignorant the only thing I can think to do is say you are wrong and ignore any facts that may disagree with My/Beliefs..
Ur/Welcome.