From: jason_watkins@...
Date: 2005-04-16T06:09:36+09:00
Subject: Re: What's beyond Rails?

Well, I guess I have a dissenting opinion:

1.) You could do photoshop via http.

It may interest you to skim http://opensource.adobe.com/ and realize
that for a couple versions now, photoshop's UI logic has been written
with declairative sublanguages of their own design. It's fairly
straightforward to imagine treating the UI componant as a declariative
document in xml, that specifies logic for preparing computational
transactions that are relayed via http. It's quite accurrate to think
of applications as a giant spreadsheet, where when a cell is notified
it's invalid it dispatches the requests necessary to re-evaluate it's
contents via http post or xmlhttprequest.

The only real barrier to photoshop via http is not http, it's the lack
of a toolkit for the client side portions. Once uppon a time I would
have said there's no high performance client side language, but these
days, I imagine javascript and most browsers html rendering would
actually be fast enough to handle the various graphics rendering tasks
a photoshop like application does.

2.) REST is good.

Statelessness is good. It's not just an annoyance. It's key to why the
web's architecture works so well. Ask yourself why didn't a rich
document format and snazzy browsers get made on top of protocols that
existed at the time, like nttp?

3.) Thick clients and local applications arn't going to go away.

But you will see a transition in that direction, particularly when part
of the applications target usage is communication. S5Presents and the
similar tools are a great example.

4.) So what's next?

I think it's going to be html + javascript. As ugly as that sounds, the
standards process of the web has always been to try to standardize some
sanity after the fact. Pro-active standards making like SVG has yet to
really work. The key is what the browser makers do. And at the moment,
html + javascript is what they do, and I don't foresee that changing
signifigantly for at least 5 years. Flash is the only thing I really
think has a chance of competing. XUL and some of the other things out
there are quite cool on a technical level, and are really better
solutions. But I don't think they can pierce the barrier to entry. Not
unless someone very big forces the issue (read as: Microsoft, US .gov,
etc).

It's a first past the post situation. Html+Javascript made it past the
post. It's a shame that the horse is lame, blind, insane and infested
with fleas, but it's what managed to win.

So for ruby specificly, what I'd like to see personally is some ruby
tools for abstracting over the guts of html + javascript rich clients.
That's certainly no small task. But it's definately what we can see
already happening all over the place. Look at Rails, it gives you
simple ajax without needing to know javascript. Look at ruby web
dialogs. Look at hobix.