Pengine - the Prolog engine running SWISH

Yes, I call it Pengine, my platform in the works. Pengine is short for
"Prolog engine" and the platform comprises a special purpose web
server and a tiny but rich JavaScript library wrapping a set of web
API:s for access to Prolog from web clients. SWISH and a number of
small demo apps are currently running on it.

At this point I could use some feedback so you are hereby invited to
take the first versions of Pengine Scratchpad, the Pengine JavaScript
API Tutorial and (if you haven't tried it before) SWISH (which really
hasn't changed much lately):

 http://swish.spyderbrain.com:5003/scratchpad

 http://swish.spyderbrain.com:5003/tutorial

 http://swish.spyderbrain.com:5003/swish

Apparently, "Pengine" is also a word in Swahili that means "perhaps",
"maybe", "possibly" or something like that. And perhaps, maybe,
possibly Pengine will turn out to be THE way to do web logic
programming in the future. I like to think so. I'm fairly sure that
"ordinary" web developers will appreciate the fact that the JavaScript
API feels very natural for a JavaScript programmer, and the fact that
they don't need to know or learn a lot of Prolog in order to make good
use of it. I like to think that something like Pengine can inspire
JavaScript programmers to learn (more) Prolog.

Experienced Prolog programmers might also be interested in Pengine.
You need to know a little bit of HTML and a little bit of JavaScript
of course, but not much. As can be seen in the Scratchpad and in the
tutorial, the way you write your Prolog code is also very natural. The
fact that if you choose, you can allow clients to run arbitrary but
safe Prolog code on the server is of course an interesting and
sometimes very useful feature. But that's just one attractive Pengine
feature out of many in my opinion. What makes me believe that
something similar to Pengine might become THE way to build web apps in
Prolog (and other LP languages) is the nice way in which Prolog and
JavaScript play together on the API level. You need to have looked
closely at the tutorial and studied the demo programs to understand
why I think it works so well.

So, what do you think? Could Pengine (or something similar) become THE
way to do web logic programming in the future? Please be critical and
feel free to argue as fiercely as you want against my admittedly very
bold claim. I promise to fight back. :-) But please also take into
consideration that this is an early and somewhat incomplete release of
Pengine.

Now, off to build that snazzy Pengine Server Admin GUI that is needed
before Pengine can be released...

Best regards,
Torbjörn



-- 
Torbjörn Lager
Professor of General and Computational Linguistics
Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science
University of Gothenburg
Box 200, SE-405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden
Phone: +46317864962