Brad Neuberg, Google Gears, and the Future of the Web 65
Linux.com has an interesting look at Google Gears and one of its leading evangelists, Brad Neuberg. "For Neuberg -- as for most developers -- the idea of expanding the Web's capabilities is intriguing in itself. But both inside and outside Google, his argument is that there's more at stake than just a particular piece of technology. In fact, he does not even seem particularly concerned whether Gears or some rival project takes on the role he envisions. What matters, he says, is that finding a solution to the problems of the Web is essential not only to the continued evolution of the Web, but also to its continued freedom. "
Fairly Rhetorical... Maybe I didn't understand? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fairly Rhetorical... Maybe I didn't understand? (Score:5, Interesting)
Best,
Brad Neuberg
Further adoption (Score:3, Interesting)
I want to look at this as a way to make even more powerful webapps, but until it gets more widespread it only seems appealing to apps that have a clear offline use.
Re:Further adoption (Score:4, Informative)
I want to look at this as a way to make even more powerful webapps, but until it gets more widespread it only seems appealing to apps that have a clear offline use.
Best,
Brad Neuberg
am i glad (Score:2, Insightful)
Why does the web need to evolve (Score:5, Interesting)
Why can't we leave the web alone, use it for what we use it for now and develop a new rich application protocol if that is what people want. It might end up replacing the web like the web replaced gopher, which replaced Archie before it, or it might become an addition to the suite of internet protocols. Why does my web browser have to be all things to all people?
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Heh, sorry, couldn't resist.
Re:Why does the web need to evolve (Score:5, Insightful)
Because getting a fundamentally new common runtime environment and/or protocol to all people is f'ing hard. Especially now that the 'net has matured. With maturity comes momentum and inertia.
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Because getting a fundamentally new common runtime environment and/or protocol to all people is f'ing hard. Especially now that the 'net has matured. With maturity comes momentum and inertia.
Sorry, I don't get this. Java has been succesful at this (as well as other languages that can run on top of the JavaVM), Flash has been succesful, heck, even Linux and stuff like MAME is spreading all over with some effort.
Let's not talk about enabling things in different ways, let's talk instead about how, after all these years with ever-increasing hardware performance, we're building layers upon layers of inefficient software so we can have crappy application performance all over again. Trying to run a
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Java has been succesful at this (as well as other languages that can run on top of the JavaVM), Flash has been succesful
These work in the web browser. There's little obvious difference between these technologies and "the Internet" as far as the common person is concerned.
Let's not talk about enabling things in different ways, let's talk instead about how, after all these years with ever-increasing hardware performance, we're building layers upon layers of inefficient software so we can have crappy application performance all over again. Trying to run applications with Javascript in a browser on a mobile phone, can it get more wasteful than that?
There are really two problems here.
One of the problems is data. I want access to my data. I want access to it anywhere. When I'm at a restaurant, I want to be able to pull out my phone and check my calendar, my mail, even open a file on my desktop. When I'm on a business trip, I want the same access on my laptop.
There are lots of solutions to the data
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Not as a general purpose user applications. Java's popularity is primarily server-side.
> Flash has been succesful,
And it runs in you web browser and generally uses HTTP to communicate with servers.
> heck, even Linux and stuff like MAME is spreading all over with some effort.
What in the world does MAME have to do with anything?
> Let's not talk about enabling things in different
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Re:Why does the web need to evolve (Score:5, Interesting)
Best,
Brad Neuberg
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We aren't trying to replace Ajax with another model.
Why not? HTML wasn't designed to be an application programming language; it was designed to display text in a device-independent manner.
Every developer here has written an application that has had requests for changes that violate one or more initial core design assumptions and has seen the disaster that results when they try to modify that application to do something that it was never intended to do.
This is what is happening with AJAX, etc. and web browsers. Web browsers were never supposed to be an inter
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The O/S is already the perfect IAHE. It fully integrates all comms and all applications, and it does so securely and efficiently.
The O/S has one big problem: it requires you to completely trust applicatons. What makes the web successful is you don't need to trust remote web sites. Imagine if for every web site you had to visit it felt like downloading a new application, with the potential risk to your machine this entails. Gears keeps the webs trust model, where you don't have to have all or nothing trust. You can visit a remote web site, and that web site can prompt the user on whether they would like to be able to store more info
Re:Why does the web need to evolve (Score:5, Insightful)
When you don't evolve stuff you have a very good chance to end up with a whole bunch of ugly ad hoc fixes.
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I agree that most web forums royally suck. Slashdot is one of the best, and it still sucks.
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With forums, I have to use a web browser. In some cases, I have to use a web browser with certain features (Javascript, for example.) I can't download all of the posts for offline perusal, and I'm limited to whatever crappy search function is implemented in that forum software.
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Had Usenet "evolved" it still might be an vigorous discussion network and not a refuge for old timers, kooks, and trolls.
Re:Why does the web need to evolve (Score:5, Interesting)
Why can't we leave the web alone, use it for what we use it for now and develop a new rich application protocol if that is what people want. It might end up replacing the web like the web replaced gopher, which replaced Archie before it, or it might become an addition to the suite of internet protocols. Why does my web browser have to be all things to all people?
The idea behind Gears is to be able to get new technologies (and existing standards we've been waiting years for) into the contemporary web so that we can actually use them today.
I agree that it would be great to have better rich application protocols. Two things you must make sure of to be successful with this though: first, successful systems tend to evolve from earlier ones; just creating an entire new system will probably not get adopted. If you can evolve the web from the inside out into your system it will have better adoption. Second, the thing that makes the web really unique is that web pages can be basic static documents all the way to full blown applications, and everything in between (just look at MySpace, which are a fusion of web pages + web applications mashed up). Just making another web clone of the desktop based paradigm will probably not be successful or move things forward.
Best,
Brad Neuberg
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Wait.. what?
Usenet evolved with things like par2, killfiles, spam filters, and probably a bunch of lower level things I wasn't around to observe.
FTP evolved a TON -- Theres like 20 rfcs for it. As early as being modified to accept IP addresses once IP was invented. Then theres things like hostmask and ident res
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You answered your own question (Score:2)
Why do we have to continue developing the web and forceing it do things way outside is problem domain. USENET did not have to evolve, ftp did not have to evolve, smtp did not, gopher did not, etc etc.
<flamebait>Yeah, and they're all dead.</flamebait>
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Sorry, bad form to reply to myself, but I forgot an important qualifier necessary to make my SMTP paragraph even remotely credible in a devil's advocate kind of way ;)
I meant to say, the exception is at work, where of course I still use email heavily. BUT, this is Exchange; now, I'm not an Exchange admin so I have no idea if it's SMTP, but knowing MS I suspect the answer is "not really", and conceptually, there's no reason why it would have to be. Within a 'sealed' workplace, nobody cares if you use a di
Google vs. Ajax (Score:2)
I'd be more impressed with Google's forays into Javascript if they could make their existing stuff work right. After several years of deployment, Google Maps still displays incorrectly in Firefox 2 if you spin the scroll wheel too fast. That's about where window refresh was at Microsoft Windows 2.x or so - broken.
Re:Google vs. Ajax (Score:5, Insightful)
AJAX is a method to shoehorn functionality into a trifecta of legacy platforms that was never really designed for it. Like retrofitting a horseless carriage with a honda civic engine and bolting on some wings, a rudder, and a propeller with the intent to fly across the atlantic.
Just because you've gotten it to fly doesn't mean you've invented a modern aircraft.
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After several years of deployment, Google Maps still displays incorrectly in Firefox 2 if you spin the scroll wheel too fast. That's about where window refresh was at Microsoft Windows 2.x or so - broken.
AJAX is a method to shoehorn functionality into a trifecta of legacy platforms that was never really designed for it. Like retrofitting a horseless carriage with a honda civic engine and bolting on some wings, a rudder, and a propeller with the intent to fly across the atlantic.
Just because you've gotten it to fly doesn't mean you've invented a modern aircraft.
Well said, friend, well said. If I had mod points, you'd definitely get a +1 from me for that.
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2. What you're describing sounds more like a limitation of the platform you're using than anything else. I'm using FF2 and scrolling like mad, trying to replicate your problem. No dice.
3. Gears != Google Maps. Nuff said.
Gears is clearly a necessary technology for the Web. The only concern I have is that it's so fundamental that it should not be part of a plugin, but rather built into the browser. I understand they're doing it as a plugin beca
Re:Google vs. Ajax (Score:5, Interesting)
BTW, one thing that make Gears unique is that its _not_ just bound to one browser; its cross browser, so we can rev the web rather than just one browser.
Best,
Brad Neuberg
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Cross-browser? Does it work on Opera? If not why not? Whose fault is it?
Yes. No. Because it's a fifth-place browser, falling just behind Safari, with of a share of around 2% (might as well complain that it doesn't work in IE5, which is also within a % point of Opera numbers). Yours, for thinking that a browser used by less than 2% of the users would have all the same cool support as browsers used by 90%.
Anyway, they're working on Safari support right now. They've talked about adding Opera support. The source is open so the only thing stopping any Opera user who can progra
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Best,
Brad Neuberg
Yahoo Pipes? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://blog.pipes.yahoo.com/about-pipes/ [yahoo.com]
From... YAHOO?!?
Pipes lets you use a GUI to write little 'programs' (functions appear as elements in a flowchart) that aggregate and process data from almost any source on the web. For fun, my first pipe was a simple experiment, I took the slashdot RSS feed and performed a flickr search on all the "imporant" keywords in each story title, then presented a list of stories+photos. Was easy, educational, funny in many cases, and not completely useless.
Re:Expanfing the internet (Score:5, Interesting)
Best,
Brad Neuberg
should he not have used a car analogy? (Score:2)
"There's only a brief period of time in which things are fluid and can change," he says. "For radio, it was the '20s, and for TV the '50s. Then things crystallize, and we have to live with those changes. Right now, the Internet is malleable, and we can put our stamp on it."
IMHO this comparison is totally off. Radio's and tv's are simple devices that cannot be 'changed' once they are in the customers hands. Computers are totally different. Applications and even protocols come (and sometimes go); Even TCP/IP is about to undergo a mayor 'upgrade'. He may be right, but this analogy does nothing to convince of that.
Re:should he not have used a car analogy? (Score:5, Interesting)
He may be right, but this analogy does nothing to convince of that.
I agree with you that TVs and radios are far more fixed and non-upgradable than computers are. However, at some point the network itself will be hard to upgrade, which we are already finding with IPv4. Its gets asymptoticly harder to upgrade deployed systems over time. I joined the Gears team because it seemed like a clever way to help delay this on the web for a bit.
Best,
Brad Neuberg
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The 'hands on the levers' you speak of are again totally different. The TV and radio stations were / are themselves responsible of what they transmit(ted). The title for 'hands on the levers of the net' would be most probable for ISPs, since they are in far fewer numbers than either content producers and content consumers and are already leveraging their (in some cases almost monopoly like) powers in for instance the web neutrality issue. But still: ISPs do not create content themselves like in a way Compus
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Criminey! So many apostrophe abuses in a single sentence. For the record: Plural nouns do not get the apostrophe, possessives do. So this should be:
See? It's simple!
And a bit of a personal rant: it *is* possible to 'overuse' 'so-called' 'scare quotes,' so you 'want' to be 'careful' about this.
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Considered the fact that english is not my native language and that I posted this in an insomniac state induced by a 9 hour jetlag after traveling for 26 hours, I think I did pretty well. And the reason I put 'changed' within quotes is that if I do not, there are always ppl on /. that state that one can indeed change a tv or radio, just by opening it up and using a soldering iron.
Please consider that language is just a way of people relaying a message to each other. While I agree that proper grammar and s
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"I like to make browsers do things that they weren't supposed to do," Brad Neuberg likes to say.
I'm sorry to say, but that is an idiotic statement!
It's an admission of the truth ;)
The PC had the same story: it was a toy piece of hardware that could barely do anything, and in successive iterations it evolved and did things it wasn't designed to do. The "real" OSes and machines were the ones that were designed for these things, and failed because they were expensive, centrally controlled, inaccessible, etc.
Best,
Brad Neuberg
will they keep my data for 10 years (Score:4, Insightful)
So will this finally fix tables? (Score:1)
Sometimes new tech should take a back seat to making existing stuff work properly.
The world is a perfect example.
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It's daft to say that since there is a lack of support in some areas, all development should be stopped across the board. Ideally everyone will move to HTMl5 and JS2, but since that isn't happening any time soon (in terms of my own career/learning it may as well be 20 years away), does that mean all the development in these areas should just stop?
People who are actually doing things (e.g. http://developers.slashdot.org/articl [slashdot.org]
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The point is there should be more attention given to current issues instead of leaving things in a semi-working state before moving on to greener pastures. There's a great deal to fix with current HTML, and it's worth it as it will be around for a long time yet.
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Best,
Brad Neuberg
Wt (Score:2)
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If I were to develop a web-based desktop application, I'd use a web framework which allows me to develop a webapp just like it was a desktop app. The only such framework I know is Wt ( http://www.webtoolkit.eu/ [webtoolkit.eu] ): C++, Qt-like API. I gave up on Rails after discovering it.
I like the Qt model. However, C++ is a pretty brittle language to base a distributed system like the web on. I agree its probably useful for certain server-side scenarios like you describe, but as a general programming model for moving the web forward its not the best choice, plus requires too much trust from the end-user.
Best,
Brad Neuberg
Expanding Kills The Web (Score:2, Informative)
JavaScript, ActionScript, embedded video, even IMAGES, can all be exploited with quite a bit of ease. Ever wonder where all those botnets come from? It ain't from e-mail attachments. People have had that lesson drained into their heads for over a decade now.
No, the botnets come from loading exploited web sites that ask the us