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Last night I managed to get a free Chrome (CR-48) laptop. :) The first thing I did was log into ObjectCloud, my operating system designed for web computers.

The nice thing about ObjectCloud is that it's an operating system that you can host yourself on your own cable modem; or inexpensively at a hosting provider like Rackspace. ObjectCloud has a very simple programming model, so you can write cloud-based web applications in a web browser on the Chrome laptop, all while hosting it on a simple server behind your router on your cable modem.

Last night I managed to get a free Chrome (CR-48) laptop. :) The first thing I did was log into ObjectCloud, my operating system designed for web computers.

The nice thing about ObjectCloud is that it's an operating system that you can host yourself on your own cable modem; or inexpensively at a hosting provider like Rackspace. ObjectCloud has a very simple programming model, so you can write cloud-based web applications in a web browser on the Chrome laptop, all while hosting it on a simple server behind your router on your cable modem.

Last night I managed to get a free Chrome (CR-48) laptop. :) The first thing I did was log into ObjectCloud, my operating system designed for web computers.

The nice thing about ObjectCloud is that it's an operating system that you can host yourself on your own cable modem; or inexpensively at a hosting provider like Rackspace. ObjectCloud has a very simple programming model, so you can write cloud-based web applications in a web browser on the Chrome laptop, all while hosting it on a simple server behind your router on your cable modem.

Mono should be looked at like WINE, useful to port programs to, useful to get some programs to run, but shouldn't be your language of choice if you want to get cross-platform apps.

I write ObjectCloud in C#, test on Mac with Mono, and deploy in on Ubuntu Linux with Mono. My experience with Mono is that it's fast and reliable, as long as you're sticking with the lower-level CLR APIs. IE, it's fine for servers that handle their own sockets; but it's not good for GUI applications.

But isn't Git easy to install and use -- for free, even if your project is proprietary and secret, not open source and public? Whatever.

Give me a break. When I was looking for a repo for ObjectCloud, I listened to a one-hour video of Linus rambling about how wonderful Git and distributed SCM are. I tried Git for about two days until I got stuck in a situation where I realized I'd have to spend at least an hour "problem solving" by crawling lots of well-meaning, but difficult-to-read, forum posts. I've never had such a confusing experience with an SCM before in my life.

At that moment I switched to Mercurial. It works, and it's easier to learn. I have hit some messes, but it took me a month or so before I got stuck, which is long enough to become comfortable figuring out how to dig out of newbie mess.

I was disappointed with Wave. About a year ago I spent a week trying to understand their source code because I wanted to use their data structures as a database and eventually build it into ObjectCloud. Their code was about 20,000 lines that essentially ran a text-based chat with no way to persist the data. I asked twice on their mailing list which interfaces I should plug into to persist the data, but I got no responses.

Basically, they tried to solve too many problems at once. If they just open-sourced a nice way to have concurrent data structures, it might have taken off; but the system for concurrent data structures was too difficult to understand or work with.

Google promoted Wave well, I remember sitting behind some Wave developers at Google shortly before they were going to show it off and they kept saying things like, "when everyone's using Wave..." Well, it takes a long time to build that kind of critical mass!

Shameless plug

I've been working on a web server that exposes a file manipulation API via AJAX with an automatically-generated JavaScript wrapper. What I found is that some kinds of operations really need some form of server-side business logic; so I added server-side JavaScript with automatic generation of an AJAX wrapper. In essence, I have a form of server-side JavaScript with a transparent RPC system for in-browser JavaScript.

http://objectcloud.com

What I've found is that server-side JavaScript is still in its infancy. (My Alpha Server likes crash a bit too much...) The point, however, is that server-side JavaScript allows for rapid development of applications because it lends itself naturally to a JSON-based RPC system that practically eliminates the complexities of serialization from languages like C, C#, Java, PHP, ect. This is especially useful because things like database queries can be pumped directly to the browser without having to write lots of data access code. Likewise, server-side JavaScript lets me quickly write glue code where my server's API would require too many back-and-forth calls; or where extending my server's API is a poor design choice.