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Google Maps Creator Takes Browsers To The Limit

Posted by Zonk on from the looking-down-from-above dept.

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."

2 of 316 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The Benign Giant? by jbrw · · Score: 4, Informative

    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/

  2. The real problem with web-app development by kronocide · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.