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Epic codefest: 7 programming languages in 7 days

Learning a new programming language isn't hard if you understand the fundamentals

By Andrew C. Oliver, InfoWorld, 03/04/13

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Page 3 of 5

I don't think it would be fair to say that I liked or disliked it, considering the fact that I spent only a day working with it. It does have enough appeal to make me want to revisit this exercise without the constraint of the do-it-in-a-day deadline. It was easy to set up, and the documentation has several examples to help you get familiar with the language. I appreciated that the Kotlin team was willing to provide us with mentor support even on short notice.

I do most of my development work on Eclipse-based IDEs, but the obvious choice of IDE for Kotlin was JetBrains IntelliJ. I used the Kara Framework to quickly set up an MVC application. It's hard to say if this was "quintessential" or not -- Kotlin hasn't been around long enough. Regardless, this was easy to work with and set up. I couldn't easily figure out how to communicate to the front end via JSON, so I quickly switched to hack string manipulation to get 'er done. Talking to the database was easy via Kotlin's JDBC library.

 Day three: Ruby Granny
Developer: Brian Crucitti, "The New Guy"

What makes Ruby special for this particular type of development is Rails, a framework for Ruby that I'm sure most people have heard of. Once I had a basic grasp of Rails, putting this application together was incredibly easy.

I installed Ruby and Rails; three Rails commands later, I had a basic app outline and database. Getting the main page set up took me a moment of searching through the new directory and replacing the existing public/index.html with my own code. After that, a bit of trial, error, and code analysis allowed me to set my JavaScript file to accurately communicate with the Ruby back end.

I didn't have many questions or trip-ups making the app. In preparation, I studied the Rails tutorial. The first few chapters were enough for me to set up almost all of the Ruby aspects of Granny's Addressbook.

I would definitely recommend using Ruby for all sorts of projects. It's a language that's very easy to read and write. I would definitely recommend using Ruby and Rails for Web applications, especially small ones.

If I had to write a similar application again, I would definitely choose to write it in Ruby over just about any other option, especially with Rails. It was so easy to set up the basic outline of the app, which is all a Granny-level app really needs.

The one drawback to this project is that I don't feel like I learned very much Ruby. I learned several Rails commands, which did all the work in creating the Ruby files for me. As I've stated before, this project was very simple to achieve using Ruby and Rails. I'm sure there's a wealth of powerful abilities in Rails and Ruby, but it wasn't called for here. I'd like to study them more.

For development, I used TextWrangler for the Mac because I like text highlighting and it has a convenient method of switching between files in a directory tree. I ordinarily use Notepad++ for Windows, and TextWrangler had a similar feel.

 Day four: JavaScript Granny
Developer: Deep Mistry, Java/Spring guy hell-bent on a NoSQL future, and yes, that is his real name

Derived from Java, Scheme (derived from Lisp), and Self (derived from Smalltalk), JavaScript has become the go-to language for most front-end developers. It has become a fundamental language for writing for Web apps mainly because RESTful APIs (using JSON) have become standard, as opposed to SOAP (using XML). When your back end is also written in JavaScript, JSON marshaling and unmarshaling becomes a near flawless natural process.

In fact while writing Granny's Addressbook in JavaScript, I didn't even think once about the whole marshaling/unmarshaling process. It occurred to me only after a POST request worked correctly that I had actually never mapped the JavaScript object at all. The weirdest thing for me (a Java Spring guy) was not thinking in terms of object-oriented design. Using variables without defining their types, passing entire methods -- er, functions -- as arguments, and closures on variables whose functions have returned long back felt totally insane the first time. However, within 24 hours of working with it, I was already starting to like it and am unsure now that I will see Java the same way as before.

I used Node.js and Express framework. I also used a node-postgres client for Node.js to work with PostgreSQL as a back-end database. I used JetBrains WebStorm IDE, which I found very easy to work with, especially since I'm already familiar with IntelliJ IDEA. WebStorm has extensive support for Node.js and Express. In fact, it includes the option to create a Node.js Express project out of the box. (WebStorm is proprietary, but I used the 30-day trial version.)

To create Granny, all I needed to do was to create a right run configuration using the app.js file (which WebStorm auto-generated), and I was good to go. One thing that I did struggle with was the lack of an option for plain-old HTML views. Instead, I was offered .jade and .jshtml views, which I was completely unfamiliar with. I did find a simple work-around, however; instead of configuring the IDE to use HTML, I let it use Jade and simply performed import <foo.html> -- and I was done.

If I were asked to implement another RESTful back end in JavaScript, I would definitely use Node.js and Express. It would be much easier and faster for me now that I know the basics of how this combo handles the flow.

I learned a lot about JavaScript and functional languages in general, including how to make Web apps with minimal code. With Java and Spring I now feel that I am writing tons of classes, interfaces, and XML files for something that could be done in a few lines of JavaScript. It got me more interested in dynamic languages, which I would most certainly pursue during my free time.

I had lots of questions regarding JavaScript in general, for which I went through some of Douglas Crockford's lectures to get a quick boot starter for JavaScript. Apart from that, for many of the database connectivity questions I went to the documentation on the node-postgres GitHub page. Otherwise, for most of the questions regarding Express or Node.js I simply searched the Internet and found similar questions on Stack Overflow.


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