2011-05-13

Ada Server Pages

It seems to me that sometimes, shoe-horning web applications into an Object Oriented design just for the sake of it just doesn't make sense. A class that doesn't have both state and operations is not a class. A framework built on classes that aren't really classes isn't really using the language as it should.

When building a small site, don't you sometimes secretly think that just plain JSP and some static helper methods wasn't all that bad? You're only half wrong. As long as you have a way out to a real language when you grow out of the shell you started in, it's not wrong to use simple tools for a simple end. It's just that for a purely procedural program, maybe Java isn't the right language.

So what's the solution? I'll tell you: Ada Server Pages. Some might call it The Thing That Should Not Be. I call it my first Ada program in almost 15 years. It compiles AdaSP pages into ada source, builds that into shared libraries, loads them into the server and calls them to serve the pages. And it works! At least on my particular OS X box.

Ada Server Pages. It's here. Tell your friends.