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Google Rebuilds Docs Platform

Posted by Soulskill on from the further-encloudificating-your-grocery-list dept.

mikemuch writes "In addition to offering faster, desktop-like performance, better imported document fidelity, and more features found in standard Office apps, Google's new infrastructure for its web-based office suite will enable the company to more easily update the apps. A side effect (or benefit, depending on where you sit) is that the new platform will ditch Gears in favor of HTML 5. For a while starting May 3 there will be no offline capability whatsoever. Collaboration is a big focus, with a new chat sidebar and real-time co-editing. The new Docs and spreadsheet apps will be opt-in previews, but a new drawing app is launching fully. Both go live later today on the Google Docs site."

4 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. Slashvertisement? by teknopurge · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Does anyone else think the submission sounds like an ad copy?

    --
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  2. Re:Still sounds shittier than OpenOffice.org. by Joe+Random · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm sure Google is using something similar to their Google Web Toolkit to write the applications in Java and have the code compiled into JavaScript.

    The thing to take away from this (and everyone should already be aware of this if they're making claims as to the usefulness of a JavaScript) is that JavaScript is Turing complete. So it clearly can be used to develop an Office-like suite of tools.

    The only real concerns are:

    • Is the language easy enough to develop in?
    • Do programs written in the language run quickly enough on the target systems?

    Since the Google toolkit is converting Java to JavaScript, the answer to #1 seems obvious. And while it's not quite as clear-cut, recent (and ongoing) improvements in browser JavaScript interpretation speed seem to indicate that #2 is likely true, too.

  3. JavaScript by Vahokif · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't get why we're still using JavaScript for everything. What we need is a bytecode-based platform like Java or .NET but completely open and managed by W3C, totally integrated in the browser instead of a plugin and with a minimal standard library that only does math, DOM, etc. It would sure as hell beat crazy hacks like compiling other languages to JavaScript.

  4. Re:HTML5 Features by Nadaka · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I am just pissed off that no one seems to want xhtml2. It is generally better than html5 in most ways, though it could use a few minor features from html5.