[Python-Dev] Ph.D. dissertation ideas? (original) (raw)

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Fri Jan 13 04:29:33 CET 2006

On 1/12/06, Bill Janssen <janssen at parc.com> wrote:

Brett,

How about building a system that compiles a Python program (possibly annotated) to an AJAX program? That is, it analyzes the program to determine what's appropriate and possible for client-side and server-side, figures out the optimal network API (reduce latency, reduce calls, reduce data transfer, increase responsiveness), generates server-side Jython to run in Tomcat (or Python for modpython), and client-side XHTML, CSS, and Javascript to implement the browser-based portion of the application. Oddities of browser implementations and Javascript VMs would be contained in the compiler and automatically pushed into the generated code. This would be a tremendously useful advance in building distributed systems that work with the Web. The current approach to AJAX is a bit like carpentry with old hand tools. You'd probably also push Python to higher levels of language-ness.

Hmm. It's an idea. I also thought of Python -> JavaScript compiler since JavaScript is not fun and getting to test using Python might be cool. But not sure how useful that would be. Plus I bet someone has does this with Java or something.

-Brett

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