Cooperation between multiple programming languages

Question

I'm a fairly advanced hobby programmer. I consider myself capable at Objective-C, Java, some straight C, Python, and general MVC design.

I've written quite a few programs but they have all been relatively self-contained, using external libraries occasionally.

When reading about larger projects, and/or more complicated programs, I hear a lot of language thrown around about "Writing one part in X, and writing this part in Y."

Since I have a lack of experience with this, I was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction. What general designs/mechanisms are employed for applications or projects written in more than one language? What is involved in a "scriptable" design?

Thanks for any guidance on the topic! -Chase

Answer 1

There is no single "right way". A multitude of approaches exist, including the .NET-way, where all the languages are hosted inside a common runtime environment with well-specified interoperability constraints, and a good old Unix-way, where all the components are supposed to communicate via pipes or sockets, using simple text-based protocols.

For the latter you can read a classic book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environment

Answer 2

Depends on what you need to do. For example if you want to build a poker game online then, most probably you would use java for the application and flash/flex for the interface. Java has the power of the libraries and the flash/flex are quite generally available and offer a rich interface. If you have a software that receives input from an online application and offers output on a specific output (label printer for example) then your online-ready software (Java/PHP/Python) would best communicate with a specially designed program on the target computer. A program for which I'd use C++ for it's technical power, rigurosity and speed compared to java. The idea is to identify the languages that suit your purpose best. In my opinion it is ideal that you use one language to do all the stuff, that is why I like java as it seems to fit everything although it has a more or less bad renown for slowness.

I see things in a kind of this way: 1. Engineered, machine oriented stuff then it is C++ (and languages of it's kind) 2. Mobile multifunctional stuff (middle-ware mainly) Java 3. Online , browser based stuff PHP especially for B2C(people oriented) applications 4. Python,Ruby etc are from my point of view somewhere between java and PHP but I never really worked with them so I can not give an exact opinion

You can link them together depending on your needs.