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Google Maps Creator Takes Browsers To The Limit
An anonymous reader writes "Addressing a crowd of developers in Sydney today, Google Maps creator Lars Rasmussen encouraged them to embrace bleeding edge technology in browser software. He cited the example of how Google Maps can command Internet Explorer to use VML (Vector Markup Language by Microsoft) to display a blue line between geographical points, but use a PNG graphic format and a linear description for the Firefox browser." From the article: "Firstly, the Web allows rapid deployment and there is no software for users to install. It's also much easier to make sure code runs on multiple browsers compared with multiple operating systems like Mac OS X and Windows. The downside is that browsers don't give programmers full access to a computer's resources such as memory, process power and hard disk space. This is a bottleneck the engineer sees being removed in future, although he thinks the simplicity of the current Web browsing experience needs to be maintained."
While the overwhelming majority of their revenue comes from advertising, don't forget that they'll also quite happily sell you a Google Applicance:
http://www.google.co.uk/enterprise/
And, I pressume, professional services to go along with that.
They'll also sell you some other completely random crap:
http://www.google-store.com/
But does come with the operating system 95% of the time.
Safari -> Mac OS X.
Internet Exploder -> Windows (Vista lal).
Mozilla/Konqueror/etc. -> (name of distro) Linux.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I assume you mean how you have the screen looking one way, but it will print shifted to another way? I was going somewhere last night and had to print two pages to cover what looked like one on my monitor (and because the printing shifts).
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
It's bad because programmers can't take advantage of those things to produce a better program. Duh.
Sorry to be the troll, but while your comment as a whole is right on, one thing isnt... "ActiveX == COM".
COM is a standard. Something on paper. An idea of how to use interfaces for binary compatibility. COM IS cross-platform, though Microsoft's implementation is not.
ActiveX was a cleaver marketing name for OLE with Automation (IDispatch for use in scripting and late binding in general). OLE IS A SPECIFIC set of COM interfaces, with a spalsh of libraries to maintain it all.
In short: OLE = COM + MS Defined Interfaces
ActiveX = OLE + Automation
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Blaming Google for Microsoft bugs? If this is not an isolated case just on your machine then surely it is MS who is to blame for buggy CSS/javascript/whatever feature it is that crashes IE. Its not that Google code is buggy, it runs and shows you the maps, it is IE that slows down and eventually falls over.
Acutally NASA was first to come out with this as a part of their World Wind / Land Sat. Open Source application (http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/). World Wind is much more advanced than googlemaps (don't get me wrong I love googlemaps) as it uses many different datasources. Some features of World Wind include a 3D Engine, Blue Marble,Landsat 7,SRTM, MODIS,Globe and Landmark set. And if you don't like how World Wind works - well then download the source and change it.
Having developed all kinds of web apps since '96 for the exact reasons given in the article (simply the most convenient platform for distributed applications) I have learned that "that browsers don't give programmers full access to a computer's resources such as memory, process power and hard disk space" is not the most limiting aspect of web app development.
The most limiting aspect comes from one of the web's strengths, that it's based on a very simple request-response protocol. This means that you can't update the browser from the server. Instead of the server sending an event to the browser when something needs to change in the user interface, the UI needs to regularly ask the server if anything has changed. The consequence is the irritating, frequent page updates in web chats and similar applications, and "unnecessary" consumption of bandwidth.
This is why you need to use Java or Flash for more advanced applications. Then you can do pretty much anything, but the client also gets a whole lot thicker, and you can't use the web UI API shared by all browsers (form widgets, basically), which is one of the reasons web apps are so convenient to make.
I'm not saying this is something that should be "fixed," the request-response protocol is generally a good thing (and very unlikely to change anyway). I'm just saying that this is the big difference between designing web apps and desktop applications.
Sure. PNG is just a bitmap format, so you can put whatever image you want in it. You draw the lines in whatever configuration you need, then anti-alias the edges. The best part is the support for alpha channel, meaning the lines are smooth regardless of what the background is.