Hi Janet,
How come Witango shielded me from all of these languages?
I know Witango is an XML code generator so why isn't there any other
products creating XML? I am asking the wrong question?
So if Witango is not PHP or C+ or whatever what is it?
Is it just XML?
If so then why don’t I see other products that are XML?
I ask this because when I was looking at other RAD tools they all
seem to end up with PHP, VB, or C+ or something but not XML.
These are some very good questions.
Witango is just one of many different Web Application platforms. Each
platform uses a different language to accomplish basically the same
thing - deliver webpages made up of content from a database. It just
so happens that part of the Witango language incorporates XML as part
of it's logical structure. Whereas other languages (PHP, C#, etc...)
only see XML as a thing that contains data.
The original Butler/Tango "vision" of how to program was way ahead of
it's time. In fact I think it was so far ahead of it's time, that
still nobody has yet accomplished quite the same ease at building
structural logical code that Witango does so well to this day.
Phil has tried to keep the vision alive (and he get's an "A" for
effort), but the marketing and hype of other technology advancements
on other platforms has clearly won out long ago.
The XML part of Witango comes from how to support the "vision" and
philosophy of the Tango Editor. To sum up why the Witango language is
wrapped in XML, I think it is because whoever is responsible for
engineering Tango as a platform was obviously thinking of the
programmer first, and the language second (not an industry standard).
Note, the XML part of Witango didn't come along until Tango 2000,
before that the TAF files were in binary format (something that other
interpreted languages still don't do).
Anyway Janet, a lot could be said about the advantages and
disadvantages of XML, but I would recommend not spending too much time
getting hung up on the XML part. What's important is that you consider
looking into a language that mimics the Metatag part of the Witango
Language. That's the part that will be important when it comes to
transposing your projects into a new language.
The Metatags of Witango are like PHP functions, or ColdFusion tags. In
my opinion, I think ColdFusion will be as close you can come to
mimicking the Metatag functionality and syntax you are used to.
But with that said, I would also recommend checking out a production
called IronSpeed. http://www.ironspeed.com/
It's not free, and it's ASP.NET based, but it is essentially a GUI
based method of building web applications (using Wizards) - very much
like how the Witango Editor Builders do it.
I hope this helps a little.
Good luck.
Scott,
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