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Back in June I blogged about Steve Yegge’s port of Ruby on Rails to Rhino (the JavaScript engine for the JVM) and his claim that JavaScript was the Next Big Language (NBL). In related news, Dion Almaer has just posted a new video interview (in the Google Code Blog series) of Steve Yegge himself talking about the Ruby on Rhino project, server-side and client side JavaScript. Its always nice to be able to put faces and voices to the names of people who have interesting ideas, and whose Blogs I am following....

While visiting InfoQ to read the article on Project Zero that prompted my last blog entry, I noticed that there was a video on Fortress (the new scientific programming language for the Java Virtual Machine that I first blogged about some time ago). In the video, recorded at the JAOO 2006 Conference, Guy Steele’s keynote The Soul of a New Programming Language gives a nice overview to the language and its philosophy....

While going through my feed-reader today, I came across another potential framework, which I can add to the list mentioned earlier. This is Project Zero, an incubator project being developed by IBM. It uses the Java platform and the scripting languages Groovy and/or PHP and seems to be directly targetted at RESTful services development but with support for traditional web applications, AJAX and mashups. I guess that I am going to have to I develop a data model and evaluate the choices that I have before I get even more confused!...

For a web application that I am developing as part of a research project I have decided on using [Python](http://python.org/) for the business logic. The reasons being that the application will use fixed-point binary arithmetic, units, and data output as line-graphs. Python seems to have the libraries that I’ll need for this and is better suited for rapid development than Java. Part of the requirements that I have been researching this last week have been concerned with the identification of a suitable web application framework for Python....

Some new features (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, podcasting) were added to my institution’s Blackboard in the last upgrade. It’s very early days but I managed to try some of these out and blog about my first impressions. Here’s my [blog entry](http://blackboard.swan.ac.uk/webapps/lobj-journal-bb_bb60/blog/LOTOOLS/_332089_1/20080115_2). It’s hosted on Blackboard so I’m not sure if it will be publicly visible. My apologies if it isn’t! Some of my views are probably influenced by [this Slideshare presentation](http://www....