Hello friends,
I understand that HTML and Javascript is the heart of the client side for the WEB. But, I don't like working in loosely typed languages with no compiler support and very little debugging tools. Is there an alternative to writing HTML and Javascript code? I understand that SUN had developed applets but wasn't very successful. I was wondering whether there are object oriented languages for developing the client side UI.

If you mean for making web pages, there are none that I can think of. HTML is the heart of the web; even if you were to use XML, you'd still have to render most of your page in HTML. XSLT (the style sheet for XML) is really only for showing off XML data. XML lets you make your own tags but it's not designed for making web pages.

What's your problem w/ HTML? It's a markup language, not a programming language. I'm assuming your beef is w/ Javascript. Sure, you can make web pages w/o Javascript. AAMOF, there's probably a dozen different languages you can use to script a site. Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby are the ones that come to mind; Python, PHP, and Ruby are all object oriented.

If you want to build web apps, you can use Ruby on Rails or, if you want to use Python, there's TurboGears, Django, and Zope. PHP is mostly for server-side stuff, but I'm sure you could use it for many client-side type fuctions. Beyond that there's Java, but it's really designed more for creating web-enabled applications and applets than web site support. It's not a scripting language so it's not ideal to make a web page from.

If you don't want to program, there's always Flash. Pretty GUI's and applications, except that it's not terribly good for search engines, people w/ disabilities, nor people w/o the Flash plugin.

Hope that sorta answered your question.

Hello Friends,
Are there many python and Ruby plugins for browsers? I am not sure. I have heard a lot about these languages but have no experience in them. But looking these up on the web I think there are not many plugins for these. What I would like is a language that can interact with the HTML DOM structure. I did a bit of reading on AJAX but that is supposed to be slow though it is considered to be hot for web development.

If you are looking for a so called "compiler based language" you should look into cgi. You could write and compile C/C++ code as a CGI applet and upload it to the webserver (as long as the webserver runs the same basic OS and architecture as the pc you compiled it on). CGI is not a substitution for HTML or PHP. You can read more into it here:

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/cgi.htm

Also you may want to think about PHP. Its much more powerfull than html and easier to use than CGI. It uses C++'s basic syntax so if you already know C you will be fine with PHP.

Python and Ruby don't require plugins, at least for your browser; the server does need to have the correct module installed. However, CGI, PHP, and other script language support need to be installed on the server too, so it'shouldn't be too much work to get support for Python or Ruby.

They work just like PHP in that all the interaction is done prior to the browser displaying the page. AJAX is "real-time" but it uses Javascript, which you said you don't want to use.

You should try FrontPage, Dreamweaver and various other Win32 applications which take the coding out of coding.