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The Future of Rich Internet Applications
Can't Get Enough Ajax writes "While Ajax continues to get most of the attention these days in the space of rich Internet apps, the future 'face' of Web applications may consist of a combination of Ajax and plug-in technologies based on the new Flash development platforms or other plug-in models. Why? The challenges of building and maintaining sophisticated software in Javascript and the lack of support for audio and video are just two reasons that any RIA strategy will involve a mixture of Ajax and one or more technologies like Flex, Laszlo, or others. But while there are significant advantages to the new RIA technologies, there are also important trade-offs including breaking the model of the Web, lack of HTML support, and more. ZDNet's Dion Hinchcliffe has a round-up of the latest generation of RIA technologies, pros and cons of each, and why there is likely a 'war' brewing among them."
... is why they are using the essentially useless HTML/HTTP stack with all the addtional layers (JS, AJAX, flash etc.) at all.
... and you can use your favourite GUI toolkit to build applications.
There are cross-platform thin-client network solutions like VNC or Nomachine's NX. They do exactly what the web x.0 wants to do, they do it fast and they do it without all the bloat and packing/unpacking of (essentially very simple) data.
Do not bring up the bandwidth argument before looking at NX first. It runs over really small links.
I also do not think that it allows additional security breaches in principle, as a web browser with all the additional plug-ins is also similar to a very high-level shell to a remote server.
Yes and no.
Rails, Cake, and Turbogears can't provide the sort of rich interaction that flash/activex/java can, no matter how great their frameworks may be. Why?
The problem is not the stateless nature of the web as much as it is the medium with which the web is presented. HTML was designed as a document language, for the static display of information. It was never designed for any sort of interactivity other than hyperlinking. Everything else that has come along is a hack on top of a simple static display medium. Even arguably solid frameworks like Rails are nothing more than a hack to provide dynamic interactivity to a system that was designed against another way of doing things.
If we really want remotely obtained rich interactivity, we need to rethink the medium. We need to drop HTML/Javascript and plugins like activex and flash. We need a new platform designed from the ground up to provide dynamic rich interactivity. That includes both the display medium *and* the means by which it is obtained. XUL was a baby step. The concepts behind XAML seem to go much further -- especially in the display department -- but still relies on stateless HTTP.
All levels of the stack need fixing, not just server-side. We need more than just hacks.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
On the other hand, the statelessness is what makes web applications possible. Lets say you have a web application that serves 100,000 different users during the course of an hour. Depending on the demands of your application, you might be able to support all of them on one server because the server doesn't have ot maintain a connection for each and every user for the entire duration of the session. The server just keeps a small bit of the state stored in a session and moves on to serving the next request. But if everyone has a stateful connection, you start running into trouble with resources. Even if nobody is actually DOING anything on the app, you've got these open connections.
I dunno, at some point I think we're going to have to ask ourselves if the web/browser is really the best way to get the kind of richness people are expencting from internet applications. By the tiem you add statefulness, better UI toolkits, better event model, etc, you don't really have a "browser" anymore. You just have a virtual machine and you find that you've just reinvented Java applets.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death