Google trabaja en el desarrollo de una nueva plataforma de desarrollo web

En el artículo Google working on advanced Web engineering se explica que Google está trabajando en la creación de una nueva plataforma de desarrollo web debido a las limitaciones que presenta la tecnología actual:

“We’re getting to the place where the Web is turning into a run time integration platform for real components,” said Alex Russell, speaking at the EclipseCon, being held this week in Reston, Virginia. At Google, Russell works on the Chrome browser. He is also the creator of the widely used Dojo JavaScript framework.

Despite its popularity, the Web offers only relatively primitive programming capabilities, compared to other platforms for delivering applications, such as Java or Microsoft Windows. One major shortcoming is that Web technologies don’t have a “common component model,” which slows code testing and reuse, he said.

As an example, Russell showed off a new element he created called commenting. For Web pages that allow user comments, the commenting element, rendered as a tag, can automatically format the text submitted by a user and even add an accompanying photo. The tag is actually a program, complete with its own API (application programming interface), Russell said. With the unified component model, HTML can be a sub-class of a larger environment, allowing for more ways to manipulate HTML code.

Google engineers, Russell included, are also developing a proposal to add classes to the next version of JavaScript. A core element of object-oriented programming, classes are blueprints for reusable chunks of data and behaviors. Today, JavaScript does not support classes, so JavaScript programmers tend to use function calls to define many chunks of operational code that aren’t actually functions, such as methods and constructors. This practice is time-consuming and makes the code more difficult to reuse.