I second that.
Non-technical work (for peanuts, or even pro-bono) is almost like a vacation. In fact, it's better than a vacation...
When you're on vacation, your mind goes idle. When you're dabbling in non-technical work, your mind gets an exercise in unused areas.
While coding full time, I have worked a few days here and there for a literary magazine, college radio station, ski patrol, and other random non-technical organizations.
It can really help you remember what it's like to have a life.
This web-app business is another web-two-oh fad that will never work because nobody want the concept of it.
That depends on what "the concept" is. If it's social networking with pastel colors, I agree: that was a fad.
But I think the concept of web-apps is actually highly desirable. Being decentralized lets you (and others) access your documents from anywhere. This facilitates collaboration and reduced your dependency on your physical computer.
The only down side I see to a pure web platform is speed, which is a temporary setback. We'll get there. I imagine that eventually we won't be able to distinguish the connection between our computer and our ISP from that between our chipset and our NIC (for large values of eventually).
A company called LiveOps, inc. has done this on a large scale with a project called Workspace (http://workspace.liveops.com), which is a ning implementation.
It's targeted at work-from-home agents (agents who work in a distributed call center), but the same idea could be applied to your traditional "brick and mortar" call center.
"It damages the basic principle of equality among web participants."
When the web participants are certificate authorities, I don't *want* equality.
I want one or two well established and trusted sources. If Verisign and Joe's Cert Auth had the same level of implicit trust, we would be in trouble.
Exactly correct. If you stick to the standards, JavaScript itself should run smoothly cross-browser.
You run into trouble with small things like trailing commas in lists and other examples that xactoguy mentioned.
The big cross browser inconsistencies are with the DOM, which is arguably very popularly tethered to JavaScript in practice, but is really just a nail to the hammer. The hammer can hit lots of other stuff too.
GWT is too complex for the quick-and-dirty PHP weenies and too simple for everyone else (restricted libraries, no control over cron jobs, email config, etc.). It's like a VPS, but without all the hand-holding. (Disclaimer - this is my blunt gut feeling. Facts may be off)
Slashdot Mirror
I second that.
Non-technical work (for peanuts, or even pro-bono) is almost like a vacation. In fact, it's better than a vacation...
When you're on vacation, your mind goes idle. When you're dabbling in non-technical work, your mind gets an exercise in unused areas.
While coding full time, I have worked a few days here and there for a literary magazine, college radio station, ski patrol, and other random non-technical organizations.
It can really help you remember what it's like to have a life.
This web-app business is another web-two-oh fad that will never work because nobody want the concept of it.
That depends on what "the concept" is. If it's social networking with pastel colors, I agree: that was a fad.
But I think the concept of web-apps is actually highly desirable. Being decentralized lets you (and others) access your documents from anywhere. This facilitates collaboration and reduced your dependency on your physical computer.
The only down side I see to a pure web platform is speed, which is a temporary setback. We'll get there. I imagine that eventually we won't be able to distinguish the connection between our computer and our ISP from that between our chipset and our NIC (for large values of eventually).
A company called LiveOps, inc. has done this on a large scale with a project called Workspace (http://workspace.liveops.com), which is a ning implementation.
It's targeted at work-from-home agents (agents who work in a distributed call center), but the same idea could be applied to your traditional "brick and mortar" call center.
"It damages the basic principle of equality among web participants." When the web participants are certificate authorities, I don't *want* equality. I want one or two well established and trusted sources. If Verisign and Joe's Cert Auth had the same level of implicit trust, we would be in trouble.
Sue Google.
Exactly correct. If you stick to the standards, JavaScript itself should run smoothly cross-browser. You run into trouble with small things like trailing commas in lists and other examples that xactoguy mentioned. The big cross browser inconsistencies are with the DOM, which is arguably very popularly tethered to JavaScript in practice, but is really just a nail to the hammer. The hammer can hit lots of other stuff too.
I know, I know... should have put more thought into that. But hey, "GWT" looks kinda like "WMD" right?
GWT is too complex for the quick-and-dirty PHP weenies and too simple for everyone else (restricted libraries, no control over cron jobs, email config, etc.). It's like a VPS, but without all the hand-holding. (Disclaimer - this is my blunt gut feeling. Facts may be off)