Pengine v0.8

Dear all,

Version 0.8 of the Pengine platform can now be reached at:

 http://swish.spyderbrain.com:5003/docs/index.html

Also, by following the links provided, source code can be downloaded
from GitHub.

Pengine is definitely still pre-alpha, and lots of things remains to
be done, in particular when it comes to:

- Safety: Need more ideas for how to handle safety when running code
owned by the admin
- Code cleanup: most of the Prolog code is very messy and things need
to be split up in modules
- Docs clean-up: The first half of the tutorial is fine, but the
second part sucks

I estimate that it will take me 2-4 weeks of fulltime work before 1.0
is ready. Unfortunatly, I now need to attend to other things, and
won't be able to do work on Pengine until the second week of September
at the earliest.

As you can probably detect from looking at the Pengine "site", my
future plans for Pengine are ambitious. You probably think I'm getting
carried away, but I do think there is a chance that something like
Pengine could stir up some interest for Prolog among at least some web
developers. When CouchDB (http://couchdb.apache.org/) was released, it
certainly meant that Erlang was receiving more interest. This could
happen to Prolog too.

So the next step on my ladder of ambition here is to try to "sell" the
Pengine platform to web application developers. So why would they
"buy" it? Well, on top of something like Pengine, front-end developers
only have to know (or learn) very little Prolog in order to use it as
(say) a back-end database to web app front-ends. And they will quickly
realise, I think, that Prolog has a lot more than a database to offer,
and therefore want to learn more. If 10 web application developers
start using Prolog after having tried Pengine, I would consider the
project a success.

Comments, suggestions, etc. are most welcome.

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