Opa Aims to Rethink Development for the Cloud
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Join For FreeSeeing this problem and wanting to deal with these issues is what motivated Henri Binsztok, the founder and CEO of a European start up company to develop a new programming language that he believes is ideal for new web, cloud and online game applications. His language, Opa, was released as open source in June 2011 and is already gaining traction in the development world, including some trials at Facebook.
As Binsztok sees it, there are two specific problems with current development languages for the cloud:
The web is built from too many pieces. Due to historical reasons,
the stack required to run web applications is overly complex and hard to
maintain in the cloud.
The web is built using fragile technologies. The only client-side
technology, Javascript; and many server-side technologies like PHP,
Ruby and Python are dynamically typed and lack proper semantics.
Nothing prevents a developer from comparing apples to oranges. As a
result, expert developers and extensive testing are required to built
quality applications.
In coming up with a solution, Binzstok is leveraging 100 person years
of PhD level research. The language, Opa, doesn’t replace any of the
stack pieces individually. Rather, it seeks to eliminate them all at
once, by proposing an entirely new paradigm for web programming. In an
Opa application, the client-side UI, server-side logic and database I/O
are all implemented in a single language. Opa isn’t alone in trying to
reinvent development; it competes with Node.js (made by Joyent) and Dart (by Google) but Binzstok believes that Opa is technically much more advanced in making web programming easy and safe.
Does the world need yet another language? At first glance the answer
to that question is an emphatic no. But in research for my whitepaper
I’ve been confronted on an ongoing basis by the complexities of
developing modern applications. If Opa can really deliver on its promise
of tighter, easier and more accessible development, it could
potentially become a strong contender for the crown of cool language de
jour…
Published at DZone with permission of Ben Kepes, DZone MVB. See the original article here.
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