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Tuesday Mar 20, 2007

Exo's Web Desktop

If you really want to see how far one can push AJAX you have to try out EXO Platform's Web OS (which is really a Web Desktop as defined by wikipedia), an Open Source desktop in a browser with skinnable look and feel, powered on the server side by Java and client side by Javascript and html (more tech details on their site)

I keep being amazed at how much one can do with JavaScript. This has really gone beyond anything I would have imagined: you literally have a OSX style look and feel desktop that appears in your browser. You can open windows, minimize them, there is a Windows XP like menu bar to start applications... I have not yet quite worked out how this could help me in my day to day life, but then I have not yet played with it seriously. One thing is for certain, it has seriously pushed back the boundary of what I thought possible.

Well, I should not have been quite so surprised when Benjamin Mestrallet demoed this at Sun Tech Days today, as I had seen a similar framework demonstrated 8 months ago when I was in Berlin (pointers please!) by some very serious german engineer who had worked for Siemens, and claimed to have put together a framework that would work on absolutely any browser efficiently. But his look and feel was nowhere near as fine tuned as Exo's now is, and so it did less to catch my imagination. It has to be said that Exo recently added a very skilled graphic artist to their team Benjamin told me, and that before that they had similar problems explaining this to people. The look is certainly astounding.

You have to see it to believe it. Luckily it is really easy to install. Just follow these steps:

And you're there.

For the lazy there are more pictures of this on Benjamin's flickr site.

For this to become a Web Operating System all resources should be identified by URIs (better even URLs). This would make Univerals Drag and Drop possible and would allow for very powerful applications to be written using the SPARQL query language.

Posted at 11:53PM Mar 20, 2007 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Java  |  Comments[5]

Comments:

Henry,
Excellent find. I will definitely look closely at this. I agree with how far JavaScript has come. I'm now waiting to see if any of these projects can come up with professional-grade documentation.
Mike

Posted by Mike Bergman on March 21, 2007 at 12:47 AM CET #

nice! reminds me of NeWS from back in the day: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/NeWS.html

Posted by James Todd on March 21, 2007 at 04:36 AM CET #

Thanks Henry for your nice comments As everything is stored in the eXo JCR in that WebOS, it means that you could reference each document thanks to an URL that points to the JCR servlet. Note that this is securely restricted though. I like the idea of provdiding a RDF triplet of all content stored in the JCR. Cheers Benjamin

Posted by Benjamin Mestrallet on March 21, 2007 at 07:50 PM CET #

I wonder how this relates to the Mozilla Desktop Environment article I found on zdnet.

Posted by Henry Story on March 22, 2007 at 09:13 AM CET #

<html> <body> <head> <script type="text/javascript"> function start() { while(1==1) { alert("You have been owned by JavaScript..."); } } </script> </head> <body onload="start()"> </body> </html>

Posted by 72.0.47.38 on March 30, 2007 at 09:01 PM CEST #

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