language parallax

A friend of mine in the anthropology department was recently looking for some help creating online web surveys/experiments. Looks like he’ll be using Wextor, the Web EXperiment generaTOR.

It’s a good example of code generation. I haven’t examined it in any detail (yet), but from what I’ve heard, it sounds like the kind of thing we’ll be seeing a lot of in the near future. The only reasonable way around the complexities of web applications is this kind of model-driven approach.

Though of course I have my own take on how these things should be written (see the paper linked from the previous post). But until we have the patterns, languages, tools, and examples handy to help people like the Wextor authors, everyone is going to have to roll their own approach.