First of all, 80% of posts so far complain about openness and beareaucracy, etc, etc. Well I can see right off the bat that no one has tried to seriously develop a mobile website. If you're still designing your HTML pages with tables because of compatibility issues with floats and absolute positioning, then you have no clue how bad standards support on mobile devices is. Even devices from the same manufacturer vary radically in screen size and feature support. Plus there's no dominant device, market share is split between hundreds of them.
Enforcing some standard on a domain name is a good thing because it will set a baseline for phone manufacturers, it doesn't make a lick of difference to web developers. You can always send a different version to their validation spider, and continue to serve up special versions for old phones if that's your mission. But given the impossibility of serious mobile development, I think cries for 'open markets' and 'content freedom' are coming from ignorance. Oh, you want the freedom to develop your site for a 10% market? Be my guest.
When your software is online, running on servers, controlled entirely by you... why go for average or mediocre? Why not be smart about it and go for something simple that bucks the "standard" trend? (SOA comes to mind).
If you have a compelling reason to do so, and it's core to your business then by all means go for it.
However, in general 'standards' are about fairly low-level base technologies. On top of that have higher level business logic / custom stuff for which there is no reasonable standard. Then on the very top you have the actual business practices. To succeed spectacularly in business you need to be thinking about those top-level business practices and how you can differentiate yourself that way.
In other words, it's not the technology, but what you do with it that counts. Standards are neither here nor there.
I could be wrong. Your mileage may vary.
Bah! I can't leave two of these wishy-washy sentences closing our your post alone. Either wait for someone to tell you you're wrong or just don't post. It's your story and you're sticking to it goddammit.
It's funny, that you can say I'm absolutely wrong followed directly by saying exactly wy I'm absolutely right.
You're blurring the issue. Distributing derivative works is not reasonably known as "freedom of use". "Using" software tends to mean running it and perhaps making modifications. If you want to take any piece of commercial software and sell modded versions you're going to have to pay through the nose. So in effect your argument is saying that the only safe software to use is BSD-licensed software. In fact, if a company has no intention of distributing the software, then the GPL is a complete non-issue.
We've been hearing about the approaching power of the web app since Java and Netscape first cozied up to each other.
It hasn't happened.
Let's be blunt, web apps are slow loading and clunky compared to the average locally installed application, and it's likely to remain that way. Even broadband won't resolve the issue. Actual bandwidth will have to get to 100 MegaBit before most users will consider a web app fast enough to use.
No one would argue that what you're saying is false, but the majority of consumers aren't looking for the most powerful software. They're looking for the easiest to use. And frankly, the most common things people do are browse the web and email (many through webmail of some sort). So the fact is that the web already _is_ the biggest market, it just isn't yet the cash cow that the PC and Windows industry are, but trying out a web application is a much lower barrier to entry for the common user than downloading some unknown piece of software.
Also, let's not forget the web has unique benefits: very simple protocol to build on, platform-agnostic, extremely rapid development, accessible from any reasonably modern networked computer with no installation, centralized and linked into online communities, ideal for delivering content. Throw in recent enhancements to web standards, and AJAX development techniques and bandwidth needs for most web applications drop down pretty low. Even at slow American broadband speeds, network latency tends to be much more of an issue than throughput for well-written sites.
Desktop applications like Photoshop and Office aren't going to the web anytime soon, that's true. But the simple things that most people want to do with their computers are extremely well-suited to the web, and that's what Microsoft doesn't get. They're safer in the corporate world where change is slow, but they could still get the rug pulled out if all the critical business systems are suddenly on Linux, and companies decide a combination of OpenOffice and Zimbra might satisfy their desktop needs for a lot cheaper.
What you really need is a development framework to build your classes around that allows for persitence. The page based, highly transitive web model is broken, and Ajax works around that.
I agree, except you're mixing two unrelated ideas. AJAX is just a method for communicating with the server that doens't require the browser to reload the page. The server could be anything under the sun, with or without persistence.
In response to the grandparent, the idea that you need persistence to make OOP worthwhile in PHP is a red herring. For small applications usually the pipe is the bottleneck, not the processor. If the application really does use that much processor, then using an imperative style is not likely to give you the performance you need anyway.
No, the choice to use OOP or not should be based on software engineering principles, not perceived performance.
My weblogs show that IE is still the dominant browser, even though my two sites are primarily trafficked by those who are tech-savvy (who you think would be using a browser other than IE).
How about posting some numbers? I run a few medium University sites (1k-5k daily visitors) with a decidedly non-techy focus and the last couple months have seen IE fall under 80% (not counting hits by the web developers and other department staff).
Obviously IE is still dominant in absolute terms, but there's a huge difference between 95% (where we were 4 years ago) and 80%.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, 80% of posts so far complain about openness and beareaucracy, etc, etc. Well I can see right off the bat that no one has tried to seriously develop a mobile website. If you're still designing your HTML pages with tables because of compatibility issues with floats and absolute positioning, then you have no clue how bad standards support on mobile devices is. Even devices from the same manufacturer vary radically in screen size and feature support. Plus there's no dominant device, market share is split between hundreds of them.
Enforcing some standard on a domain name is a good thing because it will set a baseline for phone manufacturers, it doesn't make a lick of difference to web developers. You can always send a different version to their validation spider, and continue to serve up special versions for old phones if that's your mission. But given the impossibility of serious mobile development, I think cries for 'open markets' and 'content freedom' are coming from ignorance. Oh, you want the freedom to develop your site for a 10% market? Be my guest.
When your software is online, running on servers, controlled entirely by you... why go for average or mediocre? Why not be smart about it and go for something simple that bucks the "standard" trend? (SOA comes to mind).
If you have a compelling reason to do so, and it's core to your business then by all means go for it.
However, in general 'standards' are about fairly low-level base technologies. On top of that have higher level business logic / custom stuff for which there is no reasonable standard. Then on the very top you have the actual business practices. To succeed spectacularly in business you need to be thinking about those top-level business practices and how you can differentiate yourself that way.
In other words, it's not the technology, but what you do with it that counts. Standards are neither here nor there.
I could be wrong. Your mileage may vary.
Bah! I can't leave two of these wishy-washy sentences closing our your post alone. Either wait for someone to tell you you're wrong or just don't post. It's your story and you're sticking to it goddammit.
Is it designed to quiesce to a state whereby it behaves as an unlocked and openable door?
And on the flip side, how much security does that offer, and how many ways could an intruder make it fail?
It's funny, that you can say I'm absolutely wrong followed directly by saying exactly wy I'm absolutely right.
You're blurring the issue. Distributing derivative works is not reasonably known as "freedom of use". "Using" software tends to mean running it and perhaps making modifications. If you want to take any piece of commercial software and sell modded versions you're going to have to pay through the nose. So in effect your argument is saying that the only safe software to use is BSD-licensed software. In fact, if a company has no intention of distributing the software, then the GPL is a complete non-issue.
We've been hearing about the approaching power of the web app since Java and Netscape first cozied up to each other.
It hasn't happened.
Let's be blunt, web apps are slow loading and clunky compared to the average locally installed application, and it's likely to remain that way. Even broadband won't resolve the issue. Actual bandwidth will have to get to 100 MegaBit before most users will consider a web app fast enough to use.
No one would argue that what you're saying is false, but the majority of consumers aren't looking for the most powerful software. They're looking for the easiest to use. And frankly, the most common things people do are browse the web and email (many through webmail of some sort). So the fact is that the web already _is_ the biggest market, it just isn't yet the cash cow that the PC and Windows industry are, but trying out a web application is a much lower barrier to entry for the common user than downloading some unknown piece of software.
Also, let's not forget the web has unique benefits: very simple protocol to build on, platform-agnostic, extremely rapid development, accessible from any reasonably modern networked computer with no installation, centralized and linked into online communities, ideal for delivering content. Throw in recent enhancements to web standards, and AJAX development techniques and bandwidth needs for most web applications drop down pretty low. Even at slow American broadband speeds, network latency tends to be much more of an issue than throughput for well-written sites.
Desktop applications like Photoshop and Office aren't going to the web anytime soon, that's true. But the simple things that most people want to do with their computers are extremely well-suited to the web, and that's what Microsoft doesn't get. They're safer in the corporate world where change is slow, but they could still get the rug pulled out if all the critical business systems are suddenly on Linux, and companies decide a combination of OpenOffice and Zimbra might satisfy their desktop needs for a lot cheaper.
What you really need is a development framework to build your classes around that allows for persitence. The page based, highly transitive web model is broken, and Ajax works around that.
I agree, except you're mixing two unrelated ideas. AJAX is just a method for communicating with the server that doens't require the browser to reload the page. The server could be anything under the sun, with or without persistence.
In response to the grandparent, the idea that you need persistence to make OOP worthwhile in PHP is a red herring. For small applications usually the pipe is the bottleneck, not the processor. If the application really does use that much processor, then using an imperative style is not likely to give you the performance you need anyway.
No, the choice to use OOP or not should be based on software engineering principles, not perceived performance.
My weblogs show that IE is still the dominant browser, even though my two sites are primarily trafficked by those who are tech-savvy (who you think would be using a browser other than IE).
How about posting some numbers? I run a few medium University sites (1k-5k daily visitors) with a decidedly non-techy focus and the last couple months have seen IE fall under 80% (not counting hits by the web developers and other department staff).
Obviously IE is still dominant in absolute terms, but there's a huge difference between 95% (where we were 4 years ago) and 80%.