[Q] In-Browser technology

[Gordon McMillan]

Cameron Laird wrote:
> In article <932522335.684.43 at news.remarQ.com>,
> Vladik <reason at shadow.net> wrote:
...
> >I do not know what it is supposed to be
> >a plugin or not --- but a technology that
> >allows to develop not-trivial GUI applications
> >that run withing a browser.

To amplify a bit on what Cameron wrote:

 Despite all the hype, the only things you can do reasonably portably 
in browsers (NS & IE) is vanilla JScript / JavaScript and vanilla 
Java applets. Even there you will almost certainly have to detect 
which browser you're in, and code accordingly. You may even have to 
detect which version of which browser. And things get even worse as 
soon as you need to deal with the browser's security. And it's very 
difficult to do anything useful without running up against a security 
rule.

 If you have long term relationships with your clients (so you can 
ask them to install something) and if you only have to deal with a 
limited (the smaller the better) number of browser / versions, you 
can do some neat things. (But, as Cameron points out, why bother with 
a 15 meg browser when they could just install an app - HTML forms are 
easy to write, but don't make particularly good GUIs.)

 This whole noise about browsers-as-thin-clients <choke> was started 
by the Java folks. Well, at this point, according to the same folks, 
applets are "out" and server-side is "in". And they're right - Java 
makes much more sense on the server than on the client. You can 
blame it on the browsers, but the JVM spec pushes all the hard 
work into the JVM implementation, so it should be no surprise that 
the promise was hollow. 

On the server, Zope makes even more sense.

 I found Juice very intriguing when I looked at around 5 yrs ago. 
It's not encouraging that they're still using the same wire-frame 
demo they used back then.

> What's the benefit of the browser?  It sounds
> as though you want something that works over
> a network, and operates something like Java
> and JavaScript, but programmed in a language
> "better" than Java or JavaScript, and with no
> particular server-side component.  Why are we
> talking about Web applications at all?  Is
> there some reason you're not choosing your own
> language and designing your own protocol?  Many
> of us do that sort of work daily.

- Gordon