Re: [opensuse-boosters] Fwd: Re: [ruby-devel] Possibilities of web applications

Great words that needed to be said. Will On Wednesday 27 Jan 2010 14:52:52 Klaas Freitag wrote:

Hi,

FYI, in a 'seeking danger' mood I just posted that to ruby-devel, you might also be interested. I am wearing my helmet ;-)

Klaas

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Betreff: Re: [ruby-devel] Possibilities of web applications Datum: Mittwoch 27 Januar 2010 Von: Klaas Freitag An: ruby-devel@suse.de

Hi,

[the following post does not reflect the opinion of my employer nor is it meant to be offensive, please read with a ;-) in mind. I simply could not resist. I am looking forward to discussing. ]

...

the Google I/O 2009 conference keynote talks about and demos some of the possibilities of web applications.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5aJAaGZIvk

Highly recommended !

I stopped watching it after the explanation of the canvas, I hope I did not miss important things, but really it was enough for me.

Google of course promotes the web and web apps because its their ecosystem and they really make good money out of it. From the google perspective its clear, but from our?

I know, customers are asking for web apps, webapps are cool. They are cross platform and they are 'always there', you just need a browser. Other benefits? Hmmm. No standards in GUI elements, as a result no "standard GUIs", problems with security, performance, local data keeping, accessability etc. - all these kind of problems are not taken into account. The customer will notice these later, although we already went through all that.

But what me as a developer bothers most is: Google wants us to redo from start, today it's called Javascript, not BASIC as it was called earlier, the language where people who claim they're software development experts tell us that they produce well tested, well engineered, reusable, maintainable and 'nice' code which is portable.

All progress we did with object orientation over the years, with patterns for example is thrown away with Javascript. Instead we return into dark times without versioned libraries for example which don't provide real interfaces. Well, ok, I know, Rails for example is really going into the right direction, but still: Behind that we often stumble through a dark swamp of Javascript. Or who here in the audience has ever fixed a bug in jquery for example?

Noone would argue that we have great alternatives on the desktop. With todays Qt or GTK toolkits nobody would go on a stage and show the "canvas example" because it is laughable to ask for applause for drawing a line on a canvas. Thats standard for years, using the device specific benefits like acceleration. Speaking about cross platform, yeah, you probably know that the browsers, in which one plays the Javascript are implemented with one of these toolkits, so what is really portable?

I claim that the only reason why people really want webapps is: They are fed up with installing stuff. Installing and updating stuff on a machine is pain, early windows versions did a great job to poison all computer users with the software-install-does-not-really-work trauma. But wait, browsers still need to be installed locally. But that is not so bad as they have these neat feature that you only have to click "ok" if it tells you that its already old and can be replaced.

All I am wondering about: I thought WE are the experts in software management? I know we have really great tools for that. So we have all bits and peaces together to make it completely easy and enjoyable for users to update their desktop (or personal device) software. We are not yet there, which I could experience with Fate for example where people always complained when they were asked to update. Fate was not asking "Do you want me to quickly upgrade myself?" because it was not easy to implement. I think we could make these kind of things easy, if we would investigate in that, rather than in latest web stuff.

BTW, please do not associate desktop software with "not using the cloud" or internet or so. Everything is possible of course.

Please also be sure to check out for example http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/05/13/qt-declarative-ui/ and see how little code is needed to do really breathtaking UIs with todays (gui) toolkits. How long will Javascript need to catch up? Yes, I know, you can have Win3.11 in Javascript - but who really is asking for ? ;-)

regards,

Klaas

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