Gadgetopia

I stumbled across Escapade while looking through the EditPlus Yahoo! group. It’s a very (very) lightweight server-side scripting language. It provides for include files, database access, variable assignment and retrieval, and not much else. But I had it installed in about two minutes and I was pulling data from a MySQL database about 30 seconds later, and there’s a lot to be said for that.

Look into it a little further, however, and it’s obvious that there’s not a lot of depth. There’s no string manipulation, file system functions, or much else. There is a function to run a command from the command line and capture the output, which I suppose could be used for a lot of things. Also, the URLs are goofy — every page is retreived with a querystring argument (e.g. — “http://url/exp.exe?PAGE=filename.html”).

The thing that interests me about Escapade is its potential for introducing people to server-side Web development and database access. While it’s not robust enough for anything even semi-complicated, it would give new coders simple exposure to the basic princicples of programming.

Escapade is immature right now, but the developers have big plans for it. I may not use it for anyting, but I’ll keep my eye on it.