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Online Ajax Pages The New Web Desktop?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the let-me-know-when-my-os-is-in-me-brain dept.

SphereOfInfluence writes "With our existing models for operating environments aging badly, how do we manage our information and software as we get increasingly mobile and short on attention? In a ZDNet piece, Dion Hinchcliffe discusses the rise of the new dynamic, online, roaming Ajax desktops like Netvibes, Live.com, Protopage, and Pageflakes. Will concerns about privacy and reliability kill these or is this the wave of the future?"

4 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. For Your Clicking Convenience by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Netvibes, Protopage, Pageflakes, Live.com, and a bonus Google Personalized

    Ah hypertext links. What wonders have Tim Burners Lee wrought. And look, I'm anonymous so no karma whoring.

  2. Re:Buzzword alert by Dominic_Mazzoni · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't want "REALLY COOL" "dude". I'm not 12. I just want
    information. Google manages to present relevant information from
    a couple of billion web pages with a simple HTML front end.

    I hate to break it to you, but Gmail and Google Maps are totally AJAX, and even a basic web search on Google makes use of JavaScript. Google integrates it all so seamlessly, you don't even realize that they're using fancy "Web 2.0" tricks to give you what looks like a simple HTML page.

  3. Re:XUL by Vo0k · · Score: 3, Informative

    XUL is a language for writing GUI looks with room for hooks. It's not all that much better than HTML for it. Both for XUL and for HTML you need the same Javascript backend, and if given JS backend to HTML includes xmlhttprequest() for dynamically changing the HTML content (through DOM tree), it's called AJAX.
    The kludginess of the solution lies in less-than-perfect reliablity of xmlhttprequest and hideous access to the DOM tree in JS. (e1=document.getElementById('e1'); e2=document.createNode('H1'); e2.value=reqResult; e1.parentNode.replaceChild(e1,e2); e2.id='e1';)

    With XUL it would look just the same, very similar DOM tree with the same hideous access methods, same unreliable xmlhttprequest and only different tag names. It could look differently, it could be more sleek as a GUI because it was meant to be a GUI in the first place, but it would be just as kludgy inside.

    --
    Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
  4. Re:On the whole they are closer to solution. by Dom2 · · Score: 3, Informative
    You jest, but Adobe's Flex stuff looks quite useful...

    -Dom