Key Web App Standard Approaches Consensus 143
suraj.sun tips a report up at CNet which begins:
"Browser makers, grappling with outmoded technology and a vision to rebuild the Web as a foundation for applications, have begun converging on a seemingly basic but very important element of cloud computing. That ability is called local storage, and the new mechanism is called Indexed DB. Indexed DB, proposed by Oracle and initially called WebSimpleDB, is largely just a prototype at this stage, not something Web programmers can use yet. But already it's won endorsements from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google, and together, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome account for more than 90 percent of the usage on the Net today. 'Indexed DB is interesting to both Firefox and Microsoft, so if we get to the point where we prototype it and want to ship it, it will have very wide availability,' said Chris Blizzard, director of evangelism for Mozilla. ... Microsoft publicly endorsed Indexed DB on its IE blog: 'Together with Mozilla, we're excited about a new design for local storage called Indexed DB. We think this is a great solution for the Web,' said program manager Adrian Bateman."
Re:Golden age of the web set to continue (Score:4, Insightful)
> ...it looks like the Golden Age of the web will continue...
Provided that your definition of a Golden Age includes many new and exciting exploits.
Slowly reinventing the wheel in the browser (Score:5, Insightful)
Congratulations, you've developed a framework for client-server application development. Welcome to 1990. But wait, it's different this time because it's lightweight? Only it's not. Your framework runtime (the browser) consumes many times the resources that existing client-server applications ever did, and you still can't provide the same level of functionality.
Progress in the software industry today looks like this:
- 2003: Microsoft releases Office 2003
- 2008: Google releases quirky, limited-functionality clone of Office 2003 that runs in the browser
- 2016: Google releases quirky but fully functional clone of Office 2003 that runs in the browser, only it's progress because it's Web 5.0!!!
Thanks but no thanks.
I'm glad Microsoft is involved in the early stages (Score:4, Insightful)
so they have plenty of time to plan the (seemingly) minor but maddeningly frustrating ways they'll deviate from the standard.
Need to decouple Javascript before it's too late (Score:5, Insightful)
And I see that our options as developers for interacting with this stunning new invention are still limited to one: Javascript.
With application development increasingly moving to the browser, we as developers are going to find ourselves locked into a one language platform.
The browser platform should standardize on a VM, not on a language. Say goodbye to traditional paths of evolution of programming languages driven by competition. Want to innovate by using a functional language to bring your solution to market faster? No can do. It's JavaScriptway or the highway.
Death of Web as I know it. (Score:3, Insightful)
The day I as user would not be able to resize browser window, adjust font size or copy-paste any random text from a page, will be the death of the web as I concerned.
Indexed DB/etc is OK - but rest of the carp they do under the guise of making web seamlessly integrating with the desktop is a huge leap back.
Some people has to sit for a moment and recall why web applications started winning over desktop applications.
Re:Golden age of the web set to continue (Score:5, Insightful)
I read that pushState / replaceState link and it scared me. Note the following from it:
Suppose http://mozilla.org/foo.html [mozilla.org] executes the following JavaScript:
var stateObj = { foo: "bar" };
history.pushState(stateObj, "page 2", "bar.html");
This will cause the URL bar to display http://mozilla.org/bar.html [mozilla.org], but won't cause the browser to load bar.html or even check that bar.html exists.
Why do I have a feeling that said effect can and will primarily be used for horribly evil purposes?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
The Web is better (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you're wrong. Functionality is not the name of the game. Communication and content are. Look, I was doing client-server development in the 1990s: Mac Programmer's Workshop (C++), Unix sockets (C), Microsoft Foundation Classes (C++). I would never go back. True, your example does illustrate your point. There are whole classes of application, like word processors, for which the Web is not (currently). But those are mostly stable, well-defined categories. The Web is not a better way to write Word, but it is a better way to create other software we want even more.
1. The Web is social. When you develop an application, communication between users is practically a given. Back in the day, client-server software was deployed within organizations and was focused on access to data or business processes. Communication was rare and tended to be limited.
2. The web centers on content to which developers add various functionality. You may have to work harder on your applications controls, but HTML and CSS give you tremendous power. A framework like Flash or .NET may let you put things exactly where you want them, but this takes flexibility (e.g. text sizing) away from the user. And they are still missing significant chunks of what HTML+CSS can do.
3. The Web is simple. The learning curve for web applications is dramatically lower than for the kinds of apps you are talking about. HTML gives you hyperlinks for free. It also gives you a history with forward/back buttons, bookmarkable URLs, and a world of users who have been trained to use them. Programmers who try to develop apps without these features loose out on core benefits of the Web (hello, Flash).
4. The Web is relatively unified and transparent. I can view source on any page, or if that doesn't work use Firebug to break down the DOM. These days the standards are complex, but there are real advantages over a mess of competing frameworks. Browser implementations are inconsistent: but that beats writing client-server software that works on some mix of Mac, Windows, and assorted Unix flavors, then trying to persuade the wider world to install client software.
5. Javascript doesn't suck. I was surprised too when I found this out. It has some real weaknesses for sure (dynamic scoping!). It's no Python or Ruby, but it is powerful and its idiosyncrasies pale beside, say, C++ or PHP. Perhaps its biggest flaw is the pathetically poor standard library.
If you want to write a word-processor, the weaknesses of the Web compared to traditional client-server development may be very frustrating. You could still go with client-server, which seems like the right tool for the job. But you don't. The advantages of the Web are overwhelming. It's easier to be nostalgic about the benefits of client-server than to reinvent the benefits of the web.
It's too late (Score:3, Insightful)
Want to innovate by using a functional language to bring your solution to market faster? No can do.
If you're familiar enough with functional language F (and JavaScript) to be justifiably snobby about JavaScript's status as a functional language and suggesting a VM as a solution, you shouldn't have much trouble writing an F-to-JavaScript compiler.
(If you do, then you likely fail the "justifiably" part of the snobby criteria, and you're also probably not likely to get a jump on that time-to-market measure, given how much more involved getting a standard common browser VM out into the world is going to be than developing a compiler.)
A VM's a cool idea, and maybe getting the idea into the heads of the people making standards would be worth doing. But if there's ever been anything like a "too late" point, we passed it a while ago, probably around the time Netscape split their ideas for client programming between Java and JavaScript. In the meanwhile, the JavaScript we have today is generally pretty capable, works across yesterday's, today's, and probably tomorrow's browsers, and implementations are getting faster. Maybe it's not your favorite language, but we could be doing a lot worse.
Re:Need to decouple Javascript before it's too lat (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe we could create a VM based language designed for networked applications, with a full blown security model down to the bytecode and performance as good as a static language.... And to make people comfortable we could name it something that sounds like JavaScript... I dunno... like Java.. Java... I can't think of one :)
Oh, and then Microsoft can adopt it just enough to completely derail it and prevent it from becoming useful in the browser market... And Sun can let the UI and media implementations lag permanently 5 years behind because it doesn't help them sell more server hardware... And the whole thing can just fester until Google comes along and teams of the smartest people in the world waste years of their lives building a layer of sanity over the JavaScript mess that is acceptable enough to write apps for...