[Web-SIG] Grail resurrection

[Terry Hancock]

On Friday 14 November 2003 09:41 pm, Greg Ward wrote:
> As near as I can tell, Java applets are dead dead dead -- and good
> riddance.  Java's a decent programming language, but the idea of
> embedding it in a web browser has got to be one of the all-time
> clunkers.

Why? Because of problems with Java or with the applet concept?
The former I might agree with, but not the latter.

> Python applets will never be anything more than an interesting academic
> exercise, and I think the exercise is long-since complete.

By this, you mean "applets compiled into Java from Python using Jython"
I presume, and not "applets written in Python"?  Also that apparently
you don't have uses for it.

Java applets are not really dead, although their use has become
somewhat narrow.  Flash, OTOH, is taking over the web.  It is equally
annoying to me because, like Java, it is proprietary.  I really believe
that we need an open-source plugin that does what flash does and
does it better.  Python seems like a smart possibility to me, particularly
when combined with something like PyGame.  I've brought this up
and/or discussed it on c.l.p and the pygame list and there were a
few people interested.  I've never written a plugin for Netscape, but
my understanding is that that's the thing to do -- since Mozilla and
IE both have some way to load them.

I've been wondering since this list was established whether a
Python applet browser plugin is *on-topic* for web-sig or not?
(Perhaps such an effort should be a separate project?). In any
case, this is the bit that interests me the most, as I'm already using
Zope to solve most of the other problems being addressed here
(not sure what that will mean in the future).

If you all think such discussion belongs here, I will be happy to
discuss it with anyone who's interested. ;-D  I have been hesitant
to charge forward with this, because at the moment I don't
have the time to learn the plugin API or write code.  But it's still
something I hope to make time for in the future.  But if somebody
has a close enough idea to this, and wants to work on it, maybe
I can help?  I certainly have some ideas about design issues. And
I'm disturbed to hear the comment about security problems
with the rexec modules, as I had been thinking those were pretty
solid (but then again, I haven't tried them outside of using Zope's
Python Script objects).

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com