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The Blurring Line Between PC and Web
The NYTimes has a feature about software development systems that move the Web offline and desktop applications online, with a focus on Adobe Air, which will be released tomorrow. The article has quotes from the developer behind Microsoft's Silverlight (he was a colleague at Macromedia of Adobe's Air guy), and from the head of the Mozilla Foundation about their online/offline offering, Prism.
he was a colleague at Macromedia of Adobe's Air guy
For people who would like that translated into English, he worked at Macromedia with a guy that worked on Adobe Air.
Am I the only one who frowned and thought about the security issues, when reading that?
There will always be offline applications and the need for them. There are so many situations where access to the Internet is not available.
As for having the web offline... The big thing about the web is the links between the various pages. Using a tool such as HTTrack might well enable you to keep the links between pages, thus letting you have the experience of browsing multiple domains using your web browser, even when not connected. But most people just "save as" which gives a different experience depending on if you save the full page or just the HTML, and depending on which browser you use. (Thus guaranteeing that not all the links will work.)
Anyway, I would love to be able to take all the pages that I have already saved and quickly and easily form them into some sort of net, doesn't anyone have an automatic tool to do this?
(Oh and I need to both register and have cookies enabled to see the article. Fuck that. Can someone post the full text?)
I wank in the shower.
"annoyed that he could not get to his PC data when he was traveling"... What about a laptop... the Internet data cloud will not be my primary storage area for many years, if ever... it will be a secondary backup location at best. My primary working data will reside on a fully backed up, as secure as necessary, laptop. First level backup is a self managed RAID NAS (which itself is backed up).
Holy buzzword-itis Batman. I am not exactly sure what that article was about, but Adobe's AIR, though a cool product, is no panacea. As broadband, WiFi, 3G and WiMax become ubiquitous we are still on that 20 year+ quest to develop those magical frameworks that let us easily take our apps that depend on network services "offline". The problem is, there were only ever a few use cases that made sense in an offline mode, and in 5-10 years it will be virtual impossible to go "offline".
The future is always on, always networked, and software developers who spend the vast amounts of time and effort required to replicate little portions of their database or webservice in a "local" mode are going to be eaten alive by those who simply depend on the ever increasing reliability, performance, and ubiquity of the Internet.
We already have Javascript, Flash and Java - what do AIR and Silverlight offer that is better than those? Faster? Better languages? If the improvement is that they relax the restrictions on file I/O and access to the Internet, then do they have replacement restrictions that protect the user?
Here's another article: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_apps_serious_threat_to_microsoft_office.php
Mainstream applications are moving onto the browser. Everything is changing as a result. I, for one, am having a hard time predicting the future. Does this development, for instance, presage the death of the corporate IT department?
The other day I was having a chat with our school's senior management. I observed that many apps were moving onto the browser and that this would make it easier for the students to use laptops because the school wouldn't have to be concerned about managing the software on those laptops. He observed that we still had issues with programs like AutoCad. The thing that impressed me was that the VP had a ready answer. It seems like he had already been thinking about the issue.
A sample set of one isn't something on which to draw conclusions. Even so, if management types, who don't usually spend much time thinking about IT issues, are seriously thinking about web aps, it seems like there is some enthusiasm for going that direction. Desktop applications may move online quite quickly.
...I would like to recommend keeping an eye on this interesting project, called Aviary :
http://a.viary.com/
How much of these applications run client-side? The thought of using a sluggish word-processor turns my stomach - and not the typing, but the menu interaction and so on. It reminds me of my recent cell phones. New and flashy and fully-featured as they are, it drives me out of my gourd that there is a 1/4-second delay when pressing every button. I can't stand that. I have an ancient Nokia - monochrome amber and all - and it responds instantly navigating through the address book, settings, or texting. If these online applications are anything like using a newer cell phone, count me out.
A-Bomb
The problem with AIR is that it requires "porting". A website won't just work in AIR, and once it's been ported, it will no longer work as a regular real website, as it'll have dependencies on Adobe AIR. This effectively means that if you as a developer want the best of both worlds, you'll need to maintain two version of your application.
The approach Mozilla is taking with Prism on the other hand (which is also being taken with Bubbles and Fluid, with standardization between these in the early stages of being talked about), is to make available small features which allows a real website to gain some properties on the level of a desktop application when run from Prism, without stopping to work as a website. This is the progressive enhancement approach, which helps keep the web open (any browser can continue to run the application). It's very important for developers to realize this distinction, less the web gets locked into a proprietary realm. (both Microsoft and Adobe would love nothing better than to be the sole gatekeeper to this realm.)
I have long been able to download LAMP distros in many flavors that will install with minimal fuss on widows - apparently it is even easier to get this working on other OS such as linux, mac, etc.
With such a set up it is would be very easy to set up some kind of SYNC type system between the locally (client) hosted lamp set up and online services. I am sure some kind of framework / web app could be quickly created that would allow an online and offline mirror of the site to operate.
This system is basically ready now and even more importantly open source and not locked to any closed code platforms.
All we are waiting for is for some industrious soul with some time on his hands to mold this system into a viable FOSS alternative to silverlight and apollo
Well, they enable lock-in and generate revenue for the companies that own those technologies.
Oh, wait... You meant for us? Nothing...
It may not be everyone's favorite software, but Lotus Notes has done this for a decade or more.
Mostly more control and better programming. OpenLaszlo, which is briefly mentioned in TFA, is an XML/javacript based programming language which compiles to Flash and/or DHTML. It includes a bunch of APIs for things like layout, data binding and server communication, and is one of the easiest prototyping tools I've ever used.
The slogan is "write once, run everywhere", which may be familiar to some older Slashdotters, but it's not too far off the truth. I'm using it now to develop auditing apps for the Nokia N800/810 internet tablets, and it's impressively simple.
If you're interested, I'd suggest you download it and try it, or check out the tutorial. It's very easy to get started, and the tutorial compiles and runs your code online.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
AIR provides a graphics layer inside a web browser that is 2nd to none. Firefox 3 SVG is coming along, but it's not there yet. Check out what we were able to do with AIR & Webkit: http://about.stompernet.com/scrutinizer It's a simulation of human vision dropped on top of a browser. Wish we could have done it in FF3, but it's not quite up to the task yet.
Well... probably most end users will just end up installing both.
I mean, it's not a money decision on the scale of buying your choice of player and a ton of movies.
On the WinXP side, I've been using local web hosting with XAMPP for development for around a year. Works well from a USB drive.
Lately I've also been looking at personal wikis as a kind of outliner on steroids tool. At least one launches its own micro web server and uses your choice of browser as the interface, with the scripting done server-side (but on your machine). It can run from a USB drive. I've forgotten the name of this guy, because I've been focusing on another one:
TiddlyWiki uses client-side Javascript for the scripting and runs well under Firefox, and with the usual irritations under MSIE. Reports are that it works well under Safari, Opera, etc, too. It has proven itself in small applications (size of the file:///.../myTiddlies.html up to about 2MB without hassle; haven't gotten any larger than that yet). As mentioned, storage is as a local file, with no server involvement. It's amazing how capable Javascript can be in a standards compliant browser.
I'm just starting my second cup of coffee for the day, so I'm not yet ready to dig up links to any of this. But googling on "personal wiki" will bring up plenty of reading.
I suppose I need to make it abundantly clear that this is on topic. This is all about using software designed for intarweb tubes on your local machine, which is right smack in the middle of the topic category.
Yeah this is great, until you're in a part of the world where Internet access is sporadic, slow, and $10/GB. Then suddenly having to download a few hundred megs of non-differential patches per app and needing a connection to "verify" your software is a bit more than a minor inconvenience. It's extremely annoying when software that'd designed for completely non-networked functionality REQUIRES you to hook the machine it's installed (from CD!) on to prove you haven't pirated it. This just leads to people pirating it and distributing the copies to everyone else in the same situation.
While I would very much love to live in your future of free high speed connections that are always there, the future is looking like pay per gig to clamp down on bittorrent, recover costs for universal monitoring of traffic (without need for pesky warrants), and milk people for all they're worth. "Oh, too bad your line went down when the phone company screwed up and you didn't notice when your router swapped over to the 3G cellular backup, that'll be $54,000 this month."
Here's a tip: The US is not the entire world, and companies sell to the rest too. Try telling everyone here in Africa that "in 5-10 years it will be virtual [sic] impossible to go 'offline'", I'm sure it'll be good for a laugh.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
Now back to our normal program...
One of the strengths of personal computers is that they can act autonomously. Decentralization means reliability. It means that no one can control your data, no one can deny you from it. It means that no terrorist, no hardware or software failure can take out a single company leaving all the others dead in the water.
What a needless waste of bandwidth running large applications, such as office applications on the internet would be. If every application ran from the internet, there would be little bandwidth left for anyone.
Solid state drives are new, but they won't be small for long. So, the whole air-thing is a moot point.
For those who are too young to remember.... At one time, computers and software was very expensive, they had these things called "mainframes," and they would connect these things called "dumb terminals" to them. The reason why they were called "dumb terminals" is they couldn't do anything without the mainframe, really, I'm not kidding you. Anyway, sometimes the "mainframe" would "go down." That didn't mean the same thing then as it meant today, in fact, it meant something very very bad. It meant that everyone in the office had nothing to do except talk at the water cooler. Years later they started making personal computers. They were cheap, and they helped people work even without the "mainframe." As time went on, and the software that ran on the personal computers became big, and fat, and bloated, and do you know what else, some of it became so expensive that people couldn't use them any more, so they didn't. One day, a man became upset that some people still had some money left in their pockets, so do you know what they did, that's right, they hired some marketing people and some programmers to make these things called "Web Applications." They fooled everyone. The man made lots of money, and that made him very happy, until one fateful day in an office, a "Web Application" wouldn't work, and for the first time in many years two people walked to the water cooler to talk. One of them said, "We've reduced our PCs to the level of dumb terminals." The other one said, "Yea, terminals hooked up to someone else's mainframe." They laughed, and laughed, and went to make some coffee.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Seriously, why do we need any of them to triumph? Let's forget the proprietary lock-in aspect of these technologies, let's consider that they make your page much less accessible and platform dependent (platform dependency on a web page sounds so awkward or bizare to me, really, who would want such a thing?) The fact that they screw people with disabilities, is another problem, but let's forget of all those, and remember that such pages would be slugish, please. Let's forget about this idea, it was pretty bad to begin with!
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
.. or does this sound like java applets circa 1998?
s/SUN/ADOBE/g
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Badass Resumes