From: Francis Hwang Date: 2005-04-14T05:09:40+09:00 Subject: Re: What's beyond Rails? There's an inherent trade-off: Compared to desktop apps, web apps are pretty crappy interaction-wise, but you can use web apps in a lot more places. There are lots of efforts to bring more rich interactivity to web apps: Java, Flash, AJAX, XForms, even Mozilla's XUL might count depending on how you look at it. There's no clear standard for how to do these things, so there's a lot of messiness and it might take some time for everything to get sorted out. Personally I'm also a little concerned about how highly dynamic sites push back against other web efforts. AJAX-y sites are hard to make accessible to the blind, and from what I've seen they tend to break REST, as well. REST used to be a largely academic concern, but it's only now that we're starting to pass around URIs as permanent tokens (technorati, del.icio.us, etc.) and that's a big part of REST. If I never see another session variable in a URI it'll be too soon ... Anyway, getting Photoshop in an online app is going to take some doing. When you're running a gaussian blur on a 2 MB image, you want to be as close to the metal as possible. You wouldn't want to do that in Javascript. p.s. Rich Kilmer's Flash app Alph was supposed to help with this whole issue, Rich are you still working on it? On Apr 13, 2005, at 3:24 PM, James Toomey wrote: > Somewhat off-topic rant: This isn't so much a dig at Rails but a > critique of HTML in general. I've done web development with PHP, > ColdFusion, and ASP, and being able to use Ruby in doing so (especially > with Rails' well-designed database interactivity) is certainly a > welcome change. However, the general model is still the same, in terms > of using code to write out HTML to an essentially-static page. The HTML > interface is still such a far cry from the things you can do with a > rich client. For ordering airline tickets on Travelocity or books on > Amazon, the web works great, but imagine trying to emulate Adobe > Photoshop via a web browser, or a spreadsheet like Excel. > It seems to me that there needs to be a next-generation of HTML that > enables web apps to truly be like rich client apps, and > I don't think the solution needs to be a faster connection that sucks > down the entire application in the form of massive Java applets every > time I want to use the program. Perhaps the solution does need to be a > "computer" that's designed from the ground up as a web-enabled dumb > terminal, but that has forms and controls optimized so that they > require minimal data inflow to tell them what to do. > To me, this would make the web incredibly more useful (and would put > serious potential into the claim that Google wants to become a web > operating system). If I've purchased Adobe Photoshop (or rented it, as > I'm sure will be the more likely model), instead of loading it on every > computer I use, why can't I get to Photoshop at any computer in the > world merely by logging into my personal website and getting access to > every software program I own or am renting? Why would it need to be > reloaded at every computer? This is particularly annoying when you're > visiting a friend in another city for a weekend, and jump onto his > computer to check email or show him how to do something useful, and > think, "I wish I had App X loaded on here right now." > I was disappointed to see Google Suggest being touted as innovative; it > seems to indicate that Google's going to stay within the existing web > realm and not try anything really new (as I read on the web somewhere, > "for a web app, Google Suggest is neat; for a desktop app, it's so > 1995"). For all of Google's deep pockets and reputation as innovative, > I expected to see them partner up with a hardware manufacturer and try > something dramatically different. > > > Francis Hwang http://fhwang.net/