IBM developed a new language for Rich Internet Applications

EGL (Enterprise Generation Language) has been developing at IBM since 2002. It was developed with the typical business application in mind and new capabilities have been added to support systems where the interface runs on the Web and data is pulled from other apps or invoked via services. IBM claims that EGL is the new COBOL, an easy to code business tool. To encourage take up, EGL is available for free in the guise of a Community Edition. There is no direct support for it, but help can be found in the EGL Cafe, IBM's bijou bistro for those in need of guidance or advice. Naturally, IBM isn't doing this out of the kindness of its heart. The aim is to build a generation of developers familiar with EGL to challenge the dominance of those versed in the arts of PHP or Ruby on Rails. Once users get the package (roughly a 100-200MB download), running under Java and with an Eclipse package, they can start creating rich Internet applications without having to master the intricacies of JavaScript.