Lambda the Ultimate

andrew cooke - Project Ace blueArrow
6/20/2002; 10:52:22 AM (reads: 2251, responses: 6)

andrew cooke - Re: Project Ace blueArrow
6/20/2002; 10:55:44 AM (reads: 1406, responses: 0)

Sorry, forget to credit the source - seen at JavaLobby

Wilhelm Fitzpatrick - Re: Project Ace blueArrow
6/20/2002; 12:17:32 PM (reads: 1462, responses: 0)

I'm certainly relieved to see they are not positioning it as "application development for non-programmers", as is so often done with systems of this ilk.

One thing they don't give examples of in the linked web page is their solution to building responsive UIs that allow users to access the business logic, which in my experience is often the most time consuming portion of the process.

Frank Atanassow - Expressiveness of Ace blueArrow
6/21/2002; 5:46:17 AM (reads: 1386, responses: 0)

This is only tangential, but I was surprised to read this:

The Java Pet Store application provides typical e-commerce functionality: various views of products and services, order taking, credit card processing, shipping information, and so on. [Sun's] first implementation contained 14,273 lines of code and took six months to develop... Microsoft engineers decided to use the reference application to show off the capabilities of C# and .NET, and carefully rewrote the application using 3,484 lines of hand-crafted code.

Since there is not much difference between Java and C#, either .NET has better e-commerce libraries than J2EE, or Sun programmers believe in really, really long names for their variables. :)

By contrast, a single developer has created an Ace specification of the Pet Store application consisting of just 224 lines of hand-written code

Well, that's quite impressive, but nowhere does it explain what the key language differences are between Ace and Java, or Ace and C#. If this ten-scale reduction of code lines is really due to the expressiveness of the language, and not just to the fact that Ace has large, specialized libraries for business applications, then there must be some important features that it has which cannot be macro-expanded into Java.

I suspect that, in fact, Ace is just a language with a convenient syntax for e-commerce applications and a good set of libraries, and no greater intrinsic expressiveness than Java or C#. That's not to say that it's not useful: designing reusable domain-specific libraries is difficult and important. But what prevents one from just making those libraries directly in Java? That's what I'd like to know.

Albert Y. C. Lai - Re: Project Ace blueArrow
6/22/2002; 3:00:25 PM (reads: 1258, responses: 0)

Ace replaces class declaration code with a class diagram, and control flow with a state/flow chart. Text-mode code is written only when a class attribute is defined in terms of other attributes, and to write down what happens when control enters a box in the flow chart. That is how the line count of code is reduced: by turning some code into pictures.

Frank Atanassow - Re: Project Ace blueArrow
6/23/2002; 5:22:29 AM (reads: 1240, responses: 0)

If that is true, then the statistics from the web page are quite misleading. Where do you get your information?

On the other hand, from one of the linked PDF documents:

The Ace application took one person only 6 days to develop, compared with the months likely required for Microsoft s .Net.

Patrick Logan - Re: Project Ace blueArrow
6/24/2002; 11:33:34 AM (reads: 1185, responses: 0)

Pet Store - I think the original Java code is used to illustrate a number of ways of using J2EE, which may explain the size difference between Sun's and MSFT's implementations.