« #monoglot architecture for the #win

I’ve probably spent too many nights up in North Wales recently and had way too many rants with Mark and Chris , but if it’s true that initially I’ve been quite attracted by polyglotism now I can see its risks and the costs.

On the project where I am now we are using quite some different domain specific languages to build a trivial web application: C#, CSS, HTML, XML (at least in 3 different ways: nhibernate mappings, nant build, web config), ASPX, Javascript, SQL and unfortunately some TSQL store procedures.

We didn’t plug in any other fancy new thing, some F# or some boo, could be quite cool. Neither we write our acceptance tests using ruby and cucumber like David and Mike are doing on their projects.

So, before starting to write this blog I did a search on google for posts taking about monoglotism vs polyglotism I’ve found a a good one that references this other good one criticizing polyglotism, so I am not going to criticize it, I want to think forward, what could be a good, general purpose language that will allow me to write an entire web application without having a pile of 7 or more books on the desk?

I’m quite intrigued by Javascript in these days.

Therefore I am trying to write something that uses only Javascript, server side and client side…

I’m looking at frameworks like Sammy (cheers Mark), at Node.js (Cheers Duncan), at CouchDB for the persistence layer and at at the JQuery haml plugin for the view layer (cheers Chris).

This is good seriously good stuff, the benefits on using only Javascript are enormous:

• you can rely on a solid framework like JQuery on client side code and on server side (think about validation)
• you can easily TDD your controller logic if JSON is the input and the output of your controllers
• you don’t have to mess around with SQL and embrace the NoSQL Movement
• you can write event driven fragments of the UI leveraging node.js & on the fly generated html
• you can easily cache JSON using any in memory cache provider and restful controller calls