Google Rebuilds Docs Platform 194
mikemuch writes "In addition to offering faster, desktop-like performance, better imported document fidelity, and more features found in standard Office apps, Google's new infrastructure for its web-based office suite will enable the company to more easily update the apps. A side effect (or benefit, depending on where you sit) is that the new platform will ditch Gears in favor of HTML 5. For a while starting May 3 there will be no offline capability whatsoever. Collaboration is a big focus, with a new chat sidebar and real-time co-editing. The new Docs and spreadsheet apps will be opt-in previews, but a new drawing app is launching fully. Both go live later today on the Google Docs site."
Slashvertisement? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Nah, not really.
it's something used by tons of people, and switching to HTML 5 here is a good deal *and* significant for cross platform use.
press release, not advertisement (Score:4, Informative)
A news website, with a summary that sounds like a press release.. nothing wrong here.
Not a marketing guy, but as I understand it a press release is different than normal advertising copy - it's news (in this case, news for nerds)
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Welcome to the modern world of press releases :)
Re:Slashvertisement? (Score:4, Funny)
Indeed. If I were a small company like Google, I'd be really hoping that Slashdot could provide some much-needed publicity.
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Sure. And it works too. Tomorrow I'll fire my IT department.
Not really. I don't have an IT department.
But if I had, I'd fire them. For real.
And I'm seriously thinking about asking my boss to ask her boss to fire our IT department. Though not tomorrow.
The day after tomorrow. I actually think I'm bloody well going to do it. What a bother.
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Does anyone else think the submission sounds like an ad copy?
So?
Sounds like an ad (Score:3)
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What if the new google docs is faster and has desktop-like performance?
HTML5 Features (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:HTML5 Features (Score:5, Interesting)
I am just pissed off that no one seems to want xhtml2. It is generally better than html5 in most ways, though it could use a few minor features from html5.
Re:HTML5 Features (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:HTML5 Features (Score:5, Insightful)
On the contrary, in a world where 99% of everything is broken, strictness really is a virtue. Strictness allows people to realize what isn't broken in an endless morass of crippled partial implementations. Eventually, things can be fixed. Computers and the internet do not have to be something for which everyone has resigned to being broken.
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not only because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. "
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If you are creating, and you have the choice, strict correctness is an excellent thing to aspire to and, ideally, achieve. If you are dealing with other people's(often broken) stuff, strictness is a bug(being able to test, at your option, for brokenness or correctness is all well and good); because it prevents your stuff from working with the vast majority of the world.
To use your Apollo analogy, building launch
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Strictness allows people to realize what isn't broken in an endless morass of crippled partial implementations.
Yes.
Eventually, things can be fixed.
Realistically, this is the part that never happens. From the perspective of a business, paying someone to generate web content, producing strictly-conforming XHTML content is more expensive than HTML tag soup, and browsers render them exactly the same way. Why should a business go the more expensive route? Are you really suggesting that the costs of not moving to XHTML are worth what we paid to send men to the moon?
Computers and the internet do not have to be something for which everyone has resigned to being broken.
As a software developer, my job is to make my software robust in its interactions with
Good Thing! (Score:2)
Man, it's a good thing we shot that guy in the face. Imagine humanity living together in peace, exploring the cosmos and improving the standard of living cooperatively. *SHUDDER*
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As a once-full-time-web-developer, I dropped XHTML in 2006. I went back to HTML 4.01, which was generally well supported, and stayed there. The rest of the web development world caught up a couple of years later.
What does XHTML2 offer that HTML5 doesn't?
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Vastly better forms (XForms).
It does not pollute css style classes with semantic meaning. Instead it uses a separate role attribute that is more flexible and retains separation of concerns.
It uses xml events and DOM.
Strictness, I see it as a virtue, some don't (sometimes for valid reasons, sometimes not).
Continuing the trend of separating of document structure from style.
There is more but I got some work in that I need to deal with.
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The problem with XHTML (which overall I like much much more than HTML 4.01 because of its strictness) is that some very useful things for websites were intentionally excluded, with no reliable alternatives.
Two examples:
1) target attributes for anchors. In XHTML 1.1, there is no way to indicate whether a specific link should open in the same window vs. a new window as target is not permitted unless you are using framesets.
2) Required alt tags for images. Sometimes an image is used for purposes other than a p
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1: totally agree with you here. There are javascript workarounds, but it isn't nearly as clean of a solutuon.
2: images used for styling do not need to be included in tags, they can be loaded from the stylesheet.
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Not necessarily. Often that can require additional markup to provide the necessary containers for CSS to do its work. Or, it can be that the images need to be insertable/configurable by non-coders with no CSS experience, which can require injecting the image into the markup. I've worked with several content management systems where I had no control over certain key page elements because their markup was loc
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I feel the opposite. It's a whole list of things I have to remember to turn off.
I'm hard pressed to think of a site where I like the javascript. Geolocation and offline storage: yeah more ways of being tracked. Browser form validation: that one may be useful, but I'm not sure why yet.
Even the video tag... I can turn Flash off e
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It's bad enough I have 100 tabs open, each with an AJAX-y background javascript thread running pulling updates. What I really want is a browser managed threadpool that restricts that to a sane number. Seriously, I can get firefox to routinely suck down 25% of my CPU just sitting doing nothing (with 168 tabs)... if you consider that nothing.
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They're awesome features... If only they were standardized.
For instance, the offline storage. I recently looked into it because it sounded like it was going to be really great. Then I find out there a huge push to get functionality removed and have a more basic offline storage system instead. Seriously? Ugh.
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It's not so much about client features, as it is about the whole model. I want my suppliers to take care of my ASS: availability, safety, security. All the cloudy things really don't, I can't get neither apps nor data if I get disconnected, there's no guarantee my data won't be lost, nor easy ways to make backups, and no guarantee at all that my data won't be stolen by some 3rd world subcontractor's trainee.
Re:HTML5 Features (Score:5, Insightful)
Good points. It makes no sense to take features which have proved useful on the desktop and make them available in the browser environment. Also, someone needs to stand up and tell people to stop developing these browser based applications.
If you want to edit a document, you should install a native application on every PC you want to access it on. You should have to sort out all the details of network storage and collaboration yourself. If you don't have the time or expertise to set that up, you don't deserve to be editing documents. If you accept the convenience offered by such online companies, don't be surprised when many horrible things happen to you!
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Also, someone needs to stand up and tell people to stop developing these browser based applications.
Don't be obtuse. I defend your right to express yourself through writing browser-based applications, but I have the right to criticise your expression.
If you want to edit a document, you should install a native application on every PC you want to access it on.
Yes, businesses have so much trouble installing Office on every PC. So few kids have grown up intimately familiar with computers and no-one knows how to click "Next" five times any more. You're solving a problem which does not exist, whether you like to admit it or not.
You should have to sort out all the details of network storage and collaboration yourself.
What? The underlying collaboration layer can interface with whichever storage medium on a l
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There is nothing convenient about Google Docs. If I want to do anything simple, Office is good enough and has better availability, speed, familiarity (including native UI integration) and stability. If I want to do anything complex, only Office will provide it.
I'm willing to bet that within a couple of years, Office will be just as "online" and "in the cloud" as Google docs is. It would be great to just give users a laptop and a web browser without having to install Office. Rather than install Office, the
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I'm willing to bet that within a couple of years, Office will be just as "online" and "in the cloud" as Google docs is.
You could just substitute research for "betting" and observe what MS is actually doing with their next release: building a limited online version of Office, but selling the usual feature-complete local tools which take advantage of the speed, reliability, connectivity and UI of a native app.
It would be great to just give users a laptop and a web browser without having to install Office.
Why not spend the time installing Office, rather than a browser, so they can actually get work done? Seriously, a reason to use Google Docs over Office is that it's harder to install Office than a web browser?
I find Offi
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Its easier to install a web browser and keep it up-to-date than to install every app that might be needed to for every document type you might want to use.
So, yeah, browser-based, hosted apps do have certain advantages.
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You could just substitute research for "betting" and observe what MS is actually doing with their next release: building a limited online version of Office, but selling the usual feature-complete local tools which take advantage of the speed, reliability, connectivity and UI of a native app.
I could research, but having been in IT for over a decade at this point, I will continue to "bet" until applications are actually in production. Until then, it's all vapourware as far as I'm concerned. In this case my
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I could research, but having been in IT for over a decade at this point, I will continue to "bet" until applications are actually in production.
MS actually has Office 2010 beta available for download, while it only promises a feature limited online version of Office. Yet you "bet" on the opposite outcome, namely that MS will move to a web Office.
If you want to get technical, it IS harder to install Office than a browser. The browser (IE) comes pre-installed
So technical... IE is not a usable browser for anything Web2.0, and Firefox (the best alternative) had awful enterprise management last I checked... but maybe they're delivering MSIs etc now.
At the enterprise level, configuring Office beyond facilities provided by copious centralised management tools can be
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Yet you "bet" on the opposite outcome, namely that MS will move to a web Office.
That's your interpretation of what my bet is, and your misunderstanding is probably due to my lack of clarity. Microsoft won't move Office onto the web. They will reproduce enough of the functionality to mitigate what Google and other competitors are trying to do. The question comes down to whether or not Microsoft can port their functionality to the web faster than Google et al can recreate it from the ground up on the web.
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at least until virtualization and SANs are so ubiquitous at the LAN / private WAN level that organizations can host the "online" version of Office in house.
Can vs should.
By the time Microsoft rolls out a worth while online version of Office, whatever version of IE that comes bundled with the OS will support it.
Right, and a lot better than all those competing online suites, so for anything even remotely close to usable online app delivery, you'll still have to choose a browser which doesn't have an interest in a particular app delivery business.
Firefox does have decent MSI installers and also .ADM files so that you can use GPOs to configure it. I'm not a big fan of Firefox, but I'll correct FUD anywhere I see it.
Could you provide a link, please? I know there are various unofficial installers and configuration templates, such as the ones from FrontMotion, but if we're talking about ease of deployment, this obviously doesn't compare!
In an online model you don't even have to run scripts on the clients. You configure the app in one place and the relevent settings are loaded when the clients connect to the app.
Clearly, but what's so difficult in a
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Clearly, but what's so difficult in a managed enterprise about getting every PC to run a simple configuration script? If the answer is "well, many of the PCs are fucked and have very unreliable setups", you're not going to get a uniform experience over your heterogeneous browser client environment either - and probably need to replace your IT department.
Laptops on the road are the primary example. Workstations that need to be off of the domain for whatever reason (QA test labs, security PC doing badge crea
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Laptops on the road are the primary example.
Huh? When they login, they get app configuration updates - the same way you send OS configuration updates.
Workstations that need to be off of the domain for whatever reason (QA test labs,
Why do you need to be "on the [main] domain" to push a script? If you're trying to set up a PC to be exactly like a client setup, why are you running main workflow software?
security PC doing badge creation, etc).
Why are you running main workflow software on this machine?
I used Firefox's default MSI and rolled my own package using SMS2003. It took all of fifteen minutes.
Please, where is Firefox's default MSI? It's taken me 5 of your 15 minutes to fail at finding it, so I may be lacking competence tonight.
I'd rather patch one central application than manage patches across thousands of desktops.
You have to patch the OS and browser
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Laptops on the road are the primary example.
Huh? When they login, they get app configuration updates - the same way you send OS configuration updates
What about security patches and issues when they're on the road? I know sales people who go months without visiting the office. They're also the ones plugging into client networks and public, shared access spots where they are most vulnerable. I think your average customer would be happier with the situation where their data isn't living on a random laptop i
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On every computer (regardless of OS) anyone employed by the company might ever want to use to edit a document, and on every PC anyone might ever want to share such a document with? Yeah, actually, that is a bit of a challenge.
Everyone has time to do most any task you can imagine. OTOH, most everyone also has higher-value tasks they could be performing instead
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On every computer (regardless of OS) anyone employed by the company might ever want to use to edit a document, and on every PC anyone might ever want to share such a document with? Yeah, actually, that is a bit of a challenge.
And what's so much easier about installing a suitable browser on every computer (regardless of OS) anyone employed by the company might ever want to use to edit a document, and on every PC anyone might ever want to share such a document with?
most everyone also has higher-value tasks they could be performing instead if "installing an app" was taken care of.
Stop it. Clicking "Next" 5 times and waiting a few minutes - once - is incomparable to the productivity lost by operating an online Office suite for several hours a day. It's also quicker for me to set up a desk with a pad of paper, a ballpoint pen and a calculator than
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The fact that virtually every such computer will come with such a browser bundled with the operating system, and thus not need to have one installed separately, makes that a lot easier.
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Seriously?!
More primitive UI
Reduced stability
Reduced configurability
Lack of scripting
More primitive collaboration (ironically, vs Office 2007)
Loss of dozens of features
Security awareness and implementation (now the humble employee must be aware of various implications relating to where his data might be going!)
Network downtime
Server downtime
Retraining
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Also, someone needs to stand up and tell people to stop developing these browser based applications.
Don't be obtuse. I defend your right to express yourself through writing browser-based applications, but I have the right to criticise your expression.
It would be polite to recall that people are generally 'expressing themselves' not out of obstinacy, but because they really do have a problem, and those apps really do solve it. It doesn't have to be a problem of world-shattering import; "Oh god, not the clicking next five times again, if I do this one more time, I'm going to be eaten by the alien hive-lord and Earth will be invaded!" They can instead be, "God, I'm so fucking tired of dealing with licenses, network issues, making sure that everyone is us
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"God, I'm so fucking tired of dealing with licenses
MS activation is a bitch, but this isn't an inherent problem with desktop software.
network issues,
Wait, network issues are a reason to use web-hosted software?!
making sure that everyone is using the same copy of a document,
Does your knowledge of Office end with an old copy of Office 2000 you ran on Windows 98 a decade ago? Collaboration in 2007 is provided in various guises, with the principle that you don't want to sacrifice features and usability, so you make use of the operating system's own filesharing features combined with central storage (not UI/logic) servers for advanced col
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You built a new PC, you installed Firefox, you entered username/password for the mailserver, you logged into GMail.
I built a new PC, I installed Outlook, I entered a username/password for the SSL IMAP mailserver.
Just kidding, I didn't even have to enter username/password as I could migrate my Windows account profile with a couple of clicks.
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There is nothing convenient about Google Docs. If I want to do anything simple, Office is good enough and has better availability, speed, familiarity (including native UI integration) and stability. If I want to do anything complex, only Office will provide it.
Really? Thank God you are here to tell me what is simple and what isn't. All this time I thought I had to fuck about with Wine on my work Linux station, VMWare on my Mac home computer and USB thumbdrives/VPN work servers in order to take my basic System documentation home with me to work on with Office 2007.
I'm really glad someone as smart as you can tell me that a Web driven application that is able to run on any Operating System that can run a modern web browser is wrong for my needs. No wait! I just real
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Do you understand how much money [Microsoft] Office is to license?
Almost nothing, relative to the cost of the employee sitting at the workstation. Productivity is far more important than base licence cost.
Do you have any idea how many exploits are in the Office suite alone?
Almost none, relevant to a well configured Office install. And none recent are as bad as the one big risk that is having your plaintext on an anonymous server accessible to various foreign corporations and governments.
Well, at least Google's never been penetrated and experienced information leakages, and they're responsible with full disclosure of vulnerabilities, right?
Re:HTML5 Features (Score:5, Insightful)
What convenience? The convenience to have to use their inferior-to-my-desktop-app editor, in a browser I wouldn't normally use, with security settings I wouldn't normally use, continigent on my network connection staying up?
That sounds much better than downloading a file, running the app I decided I wanted to use and learned the quirks of, and being able to put my computer to sleep, move it to a coffee shop and resume. Oh, and allowing my OS to protect my computer like I told it to.
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You should have to sort out all the details of network storage and collaboration yourself. If you don't have the time or expertise to set that up, you don't deserve to be editing documents.
I don't think that's what anybody thinks, so please avoid turning the issue into a straw man.
The advantages to online document editing are collaboration and decentralization. No more emailing a document around, then having to merge changes together. No more emailing it to yourself (what a ridiculous workaround ... and yet we've all done it). No more worries about losing a document from a hard drive crash.
All good things, right?
But is a web-based application like Google Docs the right solution? Well, now
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Young and beautiful in 1999, I was involved in writing a browser-based CRM frontend for an old time&billing suite which has been deployed to major accounting firms since the '70s.
Know what?
*Shrug*
No advantage.
It sold because it was new-buzzword-compliant, but, despite being my best effort at usability in the browser, it could offer nothing which couldn't be done more efficiently using the old native Windows interface. 10 years later and Javascript would, I guess, allow me to prettify (N.B.) the interfac
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Know what?
*Shrug*
No advantage.
It sounds like all you did was port the interface.
But what does it matter if the interface is native, java, flash, php, or html5? It's the same thing.
Yeah, you get easier installation and updates, but that's about it.
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Seriously, who cares?
Because the native desktop is managed by a typical user who is not really dumb, but has no inclination to manage the machine correctly. They usually lack the security implications of their actions. They have a nebulous understanding of how the computer works. They don't get the difference between their local computer, their files in their machine, the web site they visit. They don't even know the difference between the OS and the browser and the applications.
The situation is so bad, the shills are actual
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And by that time, any browser sufficently advanced enough will be subject to malware. I don't want to execute code on websites so I don't have to worry about trusting every idiot with my device.
To say nothing of bad code being slow. But hey, that only breaks if you have Flash/JavaScript on your websites or Java in your movies.
Why is no one happy making cont
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Sorry, but times change, needs change, the desktop was and always has been awful.
Yeah, life was much better when we all paid by the minute on the local mainframe. What a retrograde step it was for IBM/MS to come along with their PC! To put the power to work and play in the hands of individuals, rather than far away corporations... quite unacceptable.
Distribution through discs and shareware meetups was painful and i'm glad it is on the way out.
Yes, because that's what people who don't use HTML+JS apps must do now. Seriously, what?
Eventually the internet is going to be solid and reliable for (mostly) everyone.
Firstly, no it won't be - pretty much nothing throughout human history has become, let alone remained, globally solid and reliable. Secondly, so what? Wh
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web applications cannot give your computer viruses (as long as your browser does not have security issues)
Which it will. Especially as it becomes more complex. Especially viruses which upload your various cloud passwords. So you'll need antivirus anyway. Which, combined with some user awareness (gee I guess the browser is secure so I can click "Yes" when it asks if I want to install that extension by M1rcosoft....), already stops the average desktop getting infected.
Anyway, if you move the logic to the server, your concern should be shifted to viruses on the server as much as the desktop. And determined intrude
Two more days left to test it today! (Score:5, Informative)
If "real-time collaboration" and "side chat bar" sounds familiar, it's Etherpad:
Etherpad.com [etherpad.com]
Google bought the company few months ago in order to improve their Google Wave and Google Docs offerings, and I'm happy to see these efforts come to fruition. Google left the Etherpad.com service up for some more time. The end of that grace period is April 14-th (2 days from now), so you have 2 days to go and check what the new Google Docs will probably feel like. Make sure to check out the timeline replay feature, downright eerie and good fit for Google's pattern of Ubiquitous Tracking of Everything, I think.
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They did release the source code, TPB has their own clone running: piratepad [piratepad.net], there are numerous other out there.
Download the source [google.com] if you want to still run it.
JavaScript (Score:5, Interesting)
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Why?
There are loads of Javascript frameworks out there to basically give developers any functionality they might require. Speed isn't the issue anymore since Javascript engines have become multithreaded bytecode interpreters and as of late even offering hardware acceleration.
What's wrong with Javascript?
Re:JavaScript (Score:4, Insightful)
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What's the point of using an interpreted language when you could compile to, download and execute bytecode much more efficiently?
Please define "much more efficiently". Sure, it's more efficient from the computer's standpoint to run native code, but that's only part of the equation. From the user's standpoint, running something like this as a web service rather than a stand-alone executable means not having to install, never having to upgrade, and automatically having their documents available from any other computer that has an Internet connection. Yes, it may be slightly slower, but that slowdown may be well within tolerable limi
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Re:JavaScript (Score:5, Informative)
What's the point of using an interpreted language when you could compile to, download and execute bytecode much more efficiently?
Because while Javascript sucks, is bandwidth-intense and slow, it is the only Turing-complete, client-side, barely-cross-platform Web programming environment that Microsoft has implemented and which Microsoft is still forced to keep around on all default installations of Windows/Explorer.
You are perfectly right that bytecode environments are much better choices technically, but they are worth nothing to Google as long as Microsoft keeps them out of their default browser installs.
[ Note that on platforms that Google is able to influence in their entirety they are using bytecode solutions aggressively - see Android. ]
Microsoft adopted (and extend) Javascript because it wanted to kill Netscape so badly. Once they achieved that they couldn't kill Javascript anymore because 1) half of the web ran on it 2) they were lying low after the bloody [and illegal] battle with Netscape raised the interest of various [civil] law enforcement agencies 3) Microsoft thought they made Javascript incompatible enough and did not really realize how it still enabled Google's cloud apps - until it was too late.
Microsoft tried to hold out with a sucky Javascript engine as long as it could, but they eventually had to give in.
It's kind of ironic that this small domino started 10 years ago by Microsoft caused the increasingly apparent demise of Microsoft Office.
It will take another 10+ years for the process to be complete (the 100+ billion business that Microsoft has become has a lot of inertia) but it will happen - the world generally strives to optimize out the overhead of that 100+ billion dollars tax that Microsoft has become by today.
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Bad javascript is barely legible but it still beats good bytecode any day.
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Well I used to think that. There's one problem I encountered, which is that gzipped, optimized JavaScript is mindblowingly concise compared to most other forms of compiled code. You can fit a staggering amount of functionality in only a kilobyte of this stuff.
This may sound absurd, but try it for yourself. Write a piece of JavaScript to do something generic and non-platform dependent like calculate MD5. Run it through the Closure Compiler [appspot.com] which is the same tool that Google uses to optimize and check its Jav
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You mean like flash? no. Binary streams no not make sense in the human readable document format that is the web.
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More than once, though it tends to be really annoying.
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Besides Geeks, who knows that the letter 'A' is encoded as 1000001? Oh, you mean the text editor readable document format that is the web.
Why W3C? (Score:2)
They're the ones who want to keep JavaScript and HTML for everything. Don't let them screw the pooch again.
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W3C does a great job with it's standards. Why, I hear [insert your favorite browser] is so compliant it will pass the ACID3 test any day now! (Sarcasm does not apply if you use Safari, Opera or one of the several Linux browsers that actually do.)
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One, that means they don't have the power to be worth entrusting new standards to.
Two, it is their fault. They allowed Microsoft and Netscape to add to their standards, resulting in an attitude of whatever. They release overly complex standards knowing that the earlier ones aren't being adhered to. They allow themselves to be pushed around by certain companies, ensuring that other companies have a vested in
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Hey that's a great idea. Let's call it "Java"...
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It would sure as hell beat crazy hacks like compiling other languages to JavaScript.
Yes, it would have made much more sense to come up with a decent IDE for web javascript development than to do wacky hacks like that. But since they work, they'll stay with us for quite some time. In the mean time, various agencies have proven that JavaScript does not have to be slow. With some additional help, it can surely be even faster.
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No offline capabilities.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought off-line storage was a big part of HTML5? Hell we're even using it now with our iPhone apps. There are a lot of things I like about google docs. It's great because we have a Joint Venture with a company in San Francisco where we're based out of St. Louis. We can edit in real time using Skype for voice and then see what people are editing in a text document or spreadsheet.
But Microsoft Office and iWork are both on my MacBook Pro. Why? Because sometimes I'm on an airplane and need to finish up that presentation for tomorrow or write a report, etc.. Or I'm riding in a car doing the same through the backwoods where the cell towers don't go. Until I can, Google Docs will not be replacing Office or iWork as my everyday office tools.
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The reason there's no Offline capability in the new GoogleDocs is cause it's not ready yet. They say, in so many words, that they plan to have the HTML5 Offline Mode up and running soon. Until then, use the Old Version + Gears.
This may not have been a good idea, but it is very Google-esque to roll out a new product with features missing.
The emperor has no clothes: the apps are poor (Score:5, Informative)
I recently took part in a collaborative project, resulting in a published book, which was done by means of Google Docs.
I was underwhelmed. I used only the "document" (word processing) tool. There were scores of little clunky things about the user interface, many puzzles and problems involving document exchange and permissions, and the "feature-completeness" of the application was maybe late 1980s.
But what really got me was that the basic editing operations were unreliable. I would insert a 12-point subheading above a 10-point text paragraph and the whole paragraph would change to 12-point text, stuff like that. Two sections might both show normal single-spaced line spacing within the editor, yet the final PDF output would render one of them as single-spaced and the other as double-spaced.
After a while I thought perhaps it was an incompatibility with Safari, although Google does not suggest any such thing, and switched to Firefox. There were still continual problems of this kind, popping up randomly; perhaps not as often and perhaps not exactly the same as under Safari.
If this were running locally under Windows or Mac OS, people would roll on the floor laughing at it. Apple's TextEdit or Microsoft's WordPad would blow it out of the water. If this is the best Web 2.0 can do, local PCs are safe.
The thing is, the press writes about them as if Google Docs were a full-featured, commercial-quality applications... as good a substitute for Word as, say, OpenOffice. It isn't. Under some conditions I guess the collaborative features make it better than nothing (the book got finished).
No doubt the marketers will spin it out endlessly by with continuous frank acknowledgement that whatever is the actual Google Docs you can get now IS a joke, it is the NEXT one that will be desktop-application quality--just as the next version of Windows will be secure and easy to use. We will see. But the current Google Docs, if considered as a serious alternative to a locally-hosted application, is a joke.
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Under some conditions I guess the collaborative features make it better than nothing (the book got finished).
So... the emperor has some clothes, then?
I mean, collaborative is one thing Word just isn't. Google Docs is essentially a collaboration tool.
Obviously the formatting features don't match up with the ones in Office, but you're replying to an article about a complete rebuilding of Google Docs to make it faster, more collaborative and, yes to add new features.
FTA:
formatting options like a margin ruler, better numbering and bullets, and more flexible image placement
Re:The emperor has no clothes: the apps are poor (Score:5, Informative)
I think you'll find the point of the rewrite was to solve all these issues. Read the article - Docs no longer relies on your browser to do things like correctly positioning bullet points. It does it all itself.
Full disclosure. I am a Googler and we've been using this new version of Docs internally for a while. It is a significant improvement. The old Docs was basically a wrapper around your browsers HTML editing feature that auto-saved every few seconds. The new Docs is a real word processor that understands things like page breaks natively. It is fully consistent in every browser and features the real-time collaboration you saw in Wave. I enjoy using it a lot more.
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Well the collaboration features are worth more to me than the polish of MS Word (the same polish that overwrites styles for no reason and crashes documents with tables in the header I guess ;)
I agree, but.... (Score:2)
Google Docs is free. Free as in beer. And it runs on every OS. Making a comparison to OO is fine, and valid. OO is definitely superior for ONE user on ONE machine. However, it's bloated, requires java, and has dozens of other aspects that I don't like at all.
That said, I'd use either in place of paying for Microsoft Office. I really can't understand anybody's preference to MS Office over Open Office. I've made all of my students turn in their work in Open Office format. I've had 2 complaints over hu
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Mind you, similar criticism can be applied to Word, too, it's less buggy than GDocs, but still has problems. Adding a page break then wonderi
Does docs have styles now? (Score:2)
Last time I looked at Google Docs, I couldn't create a new style or modify the properties of an existing style. So it seemed to me that it was quite useless as a word processing app. Like Wordpad but slow.
The possibility to collaboratevily edit a document is really cool. But the situations in which this one feature outweighs the disadvantage of having to use some slow Wordpad alternative are quite rare for me. Last time I had a use for a shared doc it was spreadsheet over a year ago.
Shared / ACL controlled resources (Score:2)
How does Google docs handle access to shared resources? In my mind I see "official" logos approved by the marketing department, or spreadsheets and diagrams put out by the finance department. In the current model, resources are kept in file shares and access is controlled by security tokens issued at login. What is Google going to do to offer similar functionality in the cloud? How are they going to provide controlled access to often used resources? Another example might be a document template (ie. a p
Still missing revision tracking (Score:2)
I am really surprised they still haven't implemented revision tracking in their document editor. I don't have to generate many office-type documents, but a few months ago I was working with two other (non-techie) co-workers on a somewhat generic "statement of purpose" document. My first thought was to use Google docs to make it easy; but then we discovered this shortcoming. For a system that's ostensibly about collaboration, this seems like a huge oversight.
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Web apps just can't compete with real apps
This will be a funny quote in a few years.
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Re:Still sounds shittier than OpenOffice.org. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure Google is using something similar to their Google Web Toolkit [google.com] to write the applications in Java and have the code compiled into JavaScript.
The thing to take away from this (and everyone should already be aware of this if they're making claims as to the usefulness of a JavaScript) is that JavaScript is Turing complete. So it clearly can be used to develop an Office-like suite of tools.
The only real concerns are:
Since the Google toolkit is converting Java to JavaScript, the answer to #1 seems obvious. And while it's not quite as clear-cut, recent (and ongoing) improvements in browser JavaScript interpretation speed seem to indicate that #2 is likely true, too.
There is nothing evil about The Cloud! (Score:5, Funny)
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
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This was even funnier the first time I read it: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1515326&cid=30818328 [slashdot.org]
Hey, Hey, You, You (Score:2)
like just another M$ shill. No, I guess I'll stay with the Stones' lyrics.
Great idea! (Score:2)
Just like real-time co-driving - see, there are two steering wheels...
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Real-time co-driving? That's crazy! What'll they do next, put it into a plane?
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SubEthaEdit [subethaedit.net] has been offering it for years. Google Wave can do it too.