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20040617 e enjte qershor 17, 2004

The rich client/thin client debate As I explained in a previous post, last week BEA's Adam Bosworth unveiled his Alchemy intelligent caching framework. John Udell who's been playing at the limits of browser based XML applications since a long time, is bullish about it, in Thin clients and rich data - BEA's Alchemy promises mobile users a blend of browser-based ease and rich functionality. It seems like Alchemy is going to be open source: I look forward to get the bits and play with it! At the same time, Mozilla's Brendan Eich defines the goals and requirements for Mozilla 2.0 Virtual Machine.
Back to the more programming-language-specific points above: comments welcome on realistic candidates. Obvious and controversial possibilities include Mono, Java (if open source), and Parrot (last I looked, *way* too Perl6-focused, not very mature, not looking likely to mature quickly).
Wouldn't it be ironic if Mozilla's VM is Mono so that the main language for Mozilla apps would be C#? I sincerely hope it will be java. Then Joel Spolsky published a long and thoughtful essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War, where, when talking about web applications vs rich client he says:

But there's a price to pay in the smoothness of the user interface. Here are a few examples of things you can't really do well in a web application:

  1. Create a fast drawing program
  2. Build a real-time spell checker with wavy red underlines
  3. Warn users that they are going to lose their work if they hit the close box of the browser
  4. Update a small part of the display based on a change that the user makes without a full roundtrip to the server
  5. Create a fast keyboard-driven interface that doesn't require the mouse
  6. Let people continue working when they are not connected to the Internet
It's this last problem that BEA's Alchemy is tackling. Add to this a solid VM in Mozilla, and good SVG support, for richer browser based applications and you have a decent alternative to the return of the rich client that Microsoft is pushing with .NET. Interesting times. ( Qer 17 2004, 04:16:30 MD PDT ) Permalink Chat about it Technorati cosmos Tagsurf It

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