Note: VCS stands for Video Contact Sheet *NIX, visit http://p.outlyer.net/vcs/ for details.

Abstract

I’m considering an alternative language in which to rewrite VCS. It must support OOP well enough and be relatively common-place. Current candidates are Java, Python and PHP5. Comments/suggestions/preferences are welcome, either here or by mail (outlyer@gmail.com) (but leave alone language hatred/fandom!).

VCS is, no matter how you look at it, a script. It’s a piece of software that basically interfaces with other pieces of software simplifying a task that could be done manually (yet in a harder way) with them. So a scripting language was the right choice, bash is the one I know better, it is really powerful and most computers already have it installed. The-right-choice… *but*. Writing a relatively long and complex piece of code and keeping it as modular as possible in bash is a pain; anyone that may have looked at the code should agree it’s hard to read, let alone maintain. So, almost from the start I’ve been considering alternatives to bash.

The problem is I want to maintain the feats that make a script desirable (after all, it will remain technically a script as I have no intention to interface directly with ImageMagick’s or libavcodec’s libs). These features can be summarised as cross platform, no compilation and a single file approach: users should be able to download the script file and run it right away (after filling dependencies of course, just as currently).

My language candidates are PHP version 5, Python and Java.

Java, while the less script-ish of them can still be single-file (JAR) and would need no compilation (by final users). PHP since version 5 has a lot more power in regards of OOP and of course it has that massive library web developers love and hate Python is the least known by me, it’s meaningful whitespace still feels weird but apparently it’s a very good option for OOP software.

I’m currently rewriting vcs in PHP and I’m even more convinced to switch languages after having some more power on my hands. I fear though that switching away from a shell script might make some people overlook vcs.
Comments would be greatly appreaciated.