Adding D Editor Support

Nick Sabalausky a at a.a
Sun Jun 15 22:42:03 PDT 2008


"Mike Parker" <aldacron at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:g34k0q$1uns$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Chris R. Miller wrote:
>
>> If you use D for the browser based stuff, you'll have the great advantage 
>> of not needing to sink all the extra money into a server with extra RAM 
>> to support J2EE, which can consume a frightful amount of memory!
>
> Actually, when people use the term 'browser-based games' they are usually 
> referring to Flash, Silverlight, Java Applets, or some sort of custom 
> browser plugin (i.e. games that run within the browser). I'm thinking 
> that's what John is referring to. D provides no benefit there.
>
> What you are talking about are generally referred to as 'web-based games' 
> (i.e. games played via HTTP requests and/or browser scripting). And 
> really, with Java you don't need a J2EE stack for that. A low-overhead app 
> server like Jetty coupled with Servlets and JSP pages will do nicely. I'd 
> prefer that to a PHP solution. D would work just as well in that 
> environment, but my gut tells me there'd be little difference in memory 
> overhead.

If there's anything like leaderboards or multiplayer, then that would 
require a backend, and that backend could be written in D.

I would *love* for D to be a viable language for the front-end though. I 
truly despise Flash (including the official IDE), but I'm working on a 
project right now for which Flash is, unfortunately, the best option. [side 
rant] And the client (people, not browser) are on shared hosting so it's 
gotta use PHP for the backend, and I hate that every bit as much. [end side 
rant]. I truly wish I could just do the whole damn thing in D.

Which does bring me to one of the few things I *do* think VMs are good for: 
Embedded webpage applets should be in a sandbox. That's why I would actually 
like to see D support compiling to the JVM (*in addition* to native code, of 
course). Because that way I could use D as a replacement for Flash.

Come to think of it, doesn't the newest version of Flash support using C++ 
as an alternative to ECMAScript? I thought I heard that somewhere. If it 
does, maybe that opens the door for Flash-using-D? Anyone know? But then 
again anything beyond Flash 7 is poorly supported on embedded systems and as 
I understand it (which is to say: not very well) Adobe's newer "Flash Lite" 
strategy seems like more work for embedded browser developers than the old 
Flash SDK. But I'm probably wrong on that. Actually that reminds me, I have 
no idea how the Java Applet support is on embedded browsers. Might not be 
great either. Dang.

And heck, as long as I'm in pipe-dream land, along with "using D for stuff 
embedded in webpages", some D-to-PHP and D-to-ASP converters would be nice. 
That'd let me use D for back-end even when I have no control over the 
server. 'Course, you'd be giving up anything nice about being 
natively-compiled, but at least I wouldn't have to use 
ASP/PHP/some-other-dynamically-typed-flavor-of-the-month (all I really mean 
by that last one is that to a non-fan of such languages like me, it seems 
like popular dynamically typed languages keep popping up all over the 
place).

Sorry for rambling and ranting so far offtopic. 





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