Hi water-dudes!

(what do you call yourselves? water-ites? water-mongers? :)

Well just joined the group here and thought I'd post a message with
some random thoughts and questions.

I'd stumbled on Mike Plusch's Water book at a bargain bookstore 2-3
years ago and picked it up and had found it interesting but it's
gathered dust till this morning...

Just downloaded the free trial of the Steam IDE.

Question: The "days before expiration" started with -13!? How many
days do I get to try it out? 13? And will it stop working after
that or will it just start doing a nag screen or something?

I mentioned in my registration for the IDE that I work at a very
conservative company when it comes to embracing new tools or
technologies. We're a Java/J2EE/Websphere shop (a publishing
company), and we also use the entire suite of XML technologies
including XML databases and XQuery along with XSLT with Cocoon, JSPs
and Struts and AJAX etc. etc.

Question: There's a mention of using Water for AJAX on the
description of this user group meeting (now past). Is this
information online now? I can't seem to find it if so...

So the potential for streamlining development where I work with
something like Water is real. However it would be political problem
to get it in. The company tends to be a late rather than an early
adopter when it comes to things like this.

The fact that Water can call out to Java is definitely a positive for
us though. This could have possibly allowed me to bring Water
in "under the covers" as a prototyping or testing tool. But only if
it were free/open source.

Question: I'm a little unclear about the licensing model? Would I
be able to use it in this way for free at a commercial company?
Apparently not right? Or is it only the IDE that's not free? But
the language interpreter is free? Is that what it is?

Even if it's free (which would allow me to get it in without a
political fight), it would still raise some eyebrows. e.g. Even with
all the attention and hype over Ruby and Ruby on Rails no one at my
company is even considering it. And of course it's free. Comments
such as "it won't scale" are typical.

Question: Despite the syntax differences, I was thinking a lot about
Ruby as I read about Water. e.g. Ruby can very easily start
a "webrick" web server with just a line or two of code, and it
has "builder" APIs for easily generating XML where you kind of
interweave XML and Ruby code. Have you written anything attempting
to compare Water solutions to Ruby? With regard to the amount of
code required, scalability, performance, etc.?

Regarding the ConciseXML syntax, I have a computer science background
and I'm recognizing Water as a little bit of a "Lisp with angle
brackets" (right :). Unfortunately most of my coworker developers
would not see that as a positive thing as they have limited
experience with non-traditional languages (though some do know Perl,
and of course XSL isn't for the faint of heart either).

But honestly even I've yet to grok the syntax. Things like:
<font size=6 color=<v "r" "g" "b"/>.<random_value/>> Hello World </>

simply look to my eyes like a syntax error at the moment. I've
learned enough languages to know I'll overcome that, but in terms of
politics that adds to making it a hard sell at my company. We work
with XML all the time and most of my coworkers would just immediately
say "wait a minute that's not valid XML there's a problem here!"

Question: Is there any way to automatically convert from the true
XML standards compliant (DOM/SAX parseable) Water syntax to the
abbreviated ConciseXML syntax? And back again? That could actually
be helpful in selling this since so much of what we do does run
through cocoon and XSLs and gets stored in XML databases and stuff.

Even more basic Question: How could/should I explain to my coworkers
the value of this language being an XML-like syntax? This question
is fundamental right.

e.g. We've had this debate within the company with regards to JSP
tags versus template languages like Velocity. i.e. the argument has
been that Velocity not being angle brackets is *easier to read*
because they can clearly distinguish at a glance the scripting logic
from the html markup that's being conditionally/dynamically
generated.

Whereas with JSPs the tags get kind of lost amongst the html markup
such that it becomes harder to read.

I'm finding Water's approach interesting and incredibly outside-the-
box, but I've yet to be entirely clear as to exactly if or why it's
being XML(-like) is such an advantage.

Regarding my question about AJAX, I was also very curious about the
statement that Water can be used directly in the browser. I've heard
about that before but I don't know precisely what that means. Does
it require a browser plugin or something to work? Is that hard for
the end user's to install or is it fully automated? And once there,
does this mean Water can be directly used to manipulate the DOM
representation of the page in lieu of the brwoser's DOM API?

Lastly, is there anywhere I can read about success stories or read a
list of companies who are already using Water?

Thanks and sorry for the long message,

Darren Cruse