Scriptic An extension to the Java programming language, aimed to ease the development of interactive applications
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programming language interactive programming algorithm parallel programing parallelism

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An extension to the Java programming language, aimed to ease the development of interactive applications The scientific and technological advances leading to Scriptic started about half a century ago.In 1956 Stephen Cole Kleene published work on formal automata4. His work led to the concept of regular expressions. Around 1960, John Backus and Peter Naur developed a notation to express context-free grammars, which was called Backus Naur Form or BNF5. Many variants have been developed since then.In 1962 the first version of the programming language Simula9 was defined. It would become the first object oriented language. Simula also supported notions of parallelism and simulation time. In 1973, Roy Campbell and Nico Haberman published the concept of path expressions: a mechanism for expressing permitted sequences of execution, inspired by regular expressions.10 This was followed up by three more or less algebraic formalisms around 1980: · Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), by Tony Hoare · Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS) by Robin Milner · Algebra of Communicating Processes (ACP) by Jan Bergstra and Jan Willem Klop Meanwhile, on the practical side, Jan van den Bos et al. developed the Input Tool Model (ITM)14 and thereafter the Input Output Tool model (IOT)15. This applied the concept of path expressions to the specification of input patterns for interactive applications. IOT was implemented as a programming language extension to C, Pascal and Modula-2.In 1987 Andre van Delft picked up the ITM implementation, and modified it so that not only input actions would be placed in the path expressions, but also internal actions and output actions. This way Scriptic-Pascal was formed, to be transformed into versions based on Modula-2, C, and C++. The language became little by little based on the Algebra of Communicating Processes, while offering additional constructs, e.g., for iterations and actions with a given duration. Around 1990 Scriptic was meant to be a simulation language which also happened to be useful for the specification of GUI behaviour. It was only used in a few research projects on simulations, though. For several years Scriptic was left aside. In 1996 a version of based on Java was made, now offering support for multithreading. Still, there was no big spaghetti coding problem to be solved for GUI programming, and Scriptic would then not have offered a good solution for it any way. For 12 years the language was out of sight again. Meanwhile Andre van Delft noticed the emerging spaghetti problem in his daily work as a software developer. He adapted Scriptic so that it could better express event handling and threading issues. In 2009 this new version went open source.

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