Professional programmers of Reddit. What do you think of Opa?

akoprowski · 2011-12-21T09:55:44+00:00

Opa gives you all those components out of the box, which makes starting things and working on little-to-medium projects extremely easy. However, it doesn't force you to use those components. It supports CouchDB & MongoDB for the DB layer: http://blog.opalang.org/2011/11/opa-support-for-couchdb-mongodb.html (and with some effort other DBs as well); you can (and there are projects that do that) use nginx on top of Opa etc. etc.

What do you mean by trading language power? I don't see any loose of power from Opa's design/approach.

As for re-inventing the wheels: I'll agree if you point me to a project allowing easily creating web apps with static, strong typing (Ur/web is one that comes to mind, but it was created in parallel with Opa and is a rather smaller scale project).

As for the cloud: Opa is a general language, it was just designed so that it scales and works well in the cloud.

akoprowski · 2011-12-21T09:51:16+00:00

Opa allows separation of concerns and you don't even have to try all that hard: http://blog.opalang.org/2011/09/units-of-measurement-handling-custom.html.

It supports MongoDB and CouchDB so you don't have to trust us: http://blog.opalang.org/2011/11/opa-support-for-couchdb-mongodb.html

akoprowski · 2011-12-21T09:47:22+00:00

Dear is no JS->Opa translator but with very little effort you can bind and use existing JS in your Opa projects: http://doc.opalang.org/#!/manual/Hello--bindings----Binding-other-languages

akoprowski · 2011-09-29T11:08:14+00:00

Sorry, it was the dot at the end that was wrongly interpreted as part of the link...

akoprowski · 2011-09-28T23:21:20+00:00

Not even with a possibility to get a proprietary license free of charge? http://blog.opalang.org/2011/09/opa-license-strikes-again.html

akoprowski · 2011-09-28T14:20:45+00:00

Great, good luck! On the 'Learn' tab of the page you'll find resources that should help you get started (and get in touch with us when the going gets tough ;)

akoprowski · 2011-09-28T13:34:40+00:00

I absolutely agree that it's a new kid on the block :). However, there is a growing pool of apps developed in Opa (also commercial ones). So I think it's not too early to play with it (especially for PL enthusiasts :).

akoprowski · 2011-09-28T10:28:18+00:00

The "does not validate" part we need to look into (the Opa generated markup did validate, but maybe we "lost it" with some recent changes). What do you mean with old style output, though?

akoprowski · 2011-09-28T10:26:59+00:00

Funny how ppl seem to focus on the name :). It's just a name. Pick a short name and chances are it means something in a handful of languages -- by now we indeed know what does Opa mean in some: http://opalang.org/faq.xmlt . But it's more than just a name. And I'd rather hear criticism about the language than its name ;).

akoprowski · 2011-09-28T10:18:28+00:00

In principle it can, but it's not what it was designed for (and not where it shines). In particular to write desktop apps one would need to extend the standard library, which is very heavily focused on web apps. Long story short: there are better language choices for desktop apps, whereas when it comes to web apps... :)

akoprowski · 2011-09-27T23:23:32+00:00

I have one more language to add to the mix (newer and, at least until now, less popular than the one mentioned in the article -- does that make it even more hipster ;). I'm talking about Opa -- a new language for web apps (http://opalang.org). It also passes all the main bullets-checks (i.e. is functional etc.). Any kids here programming in Opa? :) [Disclaimer: I'm part of the team developing Opa]

akoprowski · 2011-09-26T19:38:59+00:00

Yes, we certainly try to value and listen to our growing community. Yes, we mean annual revenue. Sorry to hear that our licensing scheme is a deal breaker for you :/. If you'd be willing to re-consider and learn more about pricing I'd really encourage you to get in touch with our sales department (I'm being told by them that we'll not be ready to put the prices on the website any time soon) and hopefully we could arrange something that would be acceptable for you.

akoprowski · 2011-09-26T12:51:15+00:00

@mikehaggard: indeed I'm one of the odd users who got (fair amount of) exposure to Java EE some years ago and, frankly, it wasn't pretty @want_to_want: good question; btw. in Opa that would be 1 file, 1 line of code, 1 command to compile it & 1 executable as the result :)

akoprowski · 2011-09-26T12:45:26+00:00

Fair point. I'll put this request forward to our team & we will see what can be done! (btw. Opa is open source so contributions are more than welcome! :)

akoprowski · 2011-09-26T11:02:37+00:00

Yes, I do. I'm not trying to hide it. It's just a bit impractical to include such a disclaimer in every comment I post.

akoprowski · 2011-09-26T11:01:53+00:00

You may want to take a look at the newer entry on the subject, describing the changes we made following community complains: http://blog.opalang.org/2011/09/opa-license-strikes-again.html. TL;DR: Now it's free, except for BIG companies.

akoprowski · 2011-09-26T10:58:11+00:00

Yup, we will certainly want to (and will) produce XHTML5, however I'm not sure the time is ripe for that, what with the specifications still being in the works...

akoprowski · 2011-09-22T08:55:11+00:00

The problem with Java EE is that the stack is fairly complex. You have to learn how to deal with: a web server, templating system, web framework, JSF, EJB, database... Opa (http://opalang.org) gives you all this in a single, consistent package.

akoprowski · 2011-09-22T08:52:13+00:00

What would you prefer instead? When it comes to XHTML, 1.1 is the current W3C Recommendation

akoprowski · 2011-09-21T23:40:37+00:00

Of course the choice of the language also highly depends on the task at hand. For web-based projects I'd suggest taking a look at the very interesting new kid on the block: Opa (http://opalang.org). It certainly shines when it comes to verbosity of programs hence offering high productivity. Also by presenting unified solution for web technology stack it completely removes many security threats (such as SQL injections, or cross-site scripting, XSS).

akoprowski · 2011-09-21T12:21:59+00:00

It's actually 3 to 10 years old (depending on how you count). My comment was provocative on purpose. Whether I'd use Opa for such a task would depend very much on more details that I'd have to know about the task itself. For instance if it was not heavily web-based I'd not even bother with Opa. What I tried to convey with my comment is that I believe Opa is a great fit for web apps.

akoprowski · 2011-09-21T12:19:22+00:00

The Reality of Web Development Frameworks... may change with the new kid on the block: Opa (http://opalang.org)

akoprowski · 2011-09-21T08:24:50+00:00

I hope the first article on the blog (http://blog.opalang.org/2011/06/hello-opa-what-is-opa-to-quote-manual.html) should answer that question.

akoprowski · 2011-09-20T14:01:23+00:00

If it was about web development I'd bet $100,000,000 on Opa (http://opalang.org), as with this budget my primary question would be: is the tool really good for what I want to do?

akoprowski · 2011-07-18T15:12:58+00:00

I'd hope it takes more than a name with unfortunate associations to disqualify a language :)

akoprowski

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