Is there a high-level language for the web?

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Preamble

To build dynamic web-sites, we have to master at least four languages:

  • HTML for the structure of web pages
  • CSS for layout and design
  • JavaScript for interactivity
  • A language for business rules or dynamic driven data

In addition, there's SQL for persistent storage, Memcache for sessions and caching, APIs for the many different content management systems. We should also consider interacting with OpenID, Facebook, Twitter, OpenSocial in building a web application, for it to be interesting.

All in all, it's an utter mess!

If you take into account two objectives:

  • Teaching web development to kids
  • Staying productive as a team

Question

What high level systems exist that unify HTML + CSS + Javascript + (Insert High Level Language here, PHP preferred)?

Background

  1. I am a software engineer with 15+ years of experience as project lead and developer with technologies like Broadvision, Autonomy, Enterprise Java, and Oracle.

During recent years, I have focused on the developing community websites, using Drupal or PHP frameworks such as CakePHP. I like web development and enjoy the impedance mismatch between the technologies involved. Still the inevitable conclusion I come to is there must be a better way.

  1. I am the father of two sons (13 and 9), and while I don't want them to become programmers I would like them to comprehend computers as more than gaming machines. I like to motivate them to tinker a bit with web development to express themselves.

Whenever I show them bits and pieces, I would love for them to have a toolset that allows them to create "interesting" results in an hour or two on a Sunday afternoon.

high-level language-agnostic frameworks php
19 Answers

Check out Opa: http://opalang.org/

This is an up and coming web development technology. It looks quite promising. I have done a lot of web development over the past couple years and if I had to make a prediction which up and new framework/language/technology is going to be the primary way websites are developed in ~5-10 years I would say it will be Opa.

The documentation is great, the community is great, the tutorials and responsiveness to questions asked of the team working on the project is excellent. Overall they seem to have an attention to detail in regards to developing this new framework that seems to be unmatched.

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