[Baypiggies] Sever vs Client

[Shannon -jj Behrens]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:27 AM, Roderick
Llewellyn<roderick at sanfransystems.com> wrote:
> This is an extremely old debate, only the technologies change. It was once
> referred to as the "wheel of kharma"... at time t0 centralized computing is
> all you have, then the center is overloaded so some processing is pushed
> away from the center at time t1 (for example, in the original IBM 360
> mainframe, they introduced "channels" which were I/O computers basically,
> with programs running in them), then control gets lost and management wants
> to centralize everything so at time t2 things move back from the center
> (remember Sun's diskless nodes and all that? and how at one time printers
> were extremely expensive and how a lot of early corporate networks (like
> Sun's NFS) were largely designed to share printers), and the wheel keeps
> turning. I think there will be an endless juggling of services back and
> forth between central and distributed systems. Each "central" computer these
> days is practically becoming a mesh anyway. That being said, there will
> always be far more client computers than servers so anything that can be
> offloaded to clients increases scalability as has been already mentioned.
> Eventually we'll all have something like contact lenses that are themselves
> computers and can project any images we want. A really good science-fiction
> book about this is Vernor Vinge's "Rainbow's End"... he captures a possible
> 20-year in the future possibility for distributed computing without making
> absurd claims for its power.
> - Rod L.

You're not the first person to accuse me of writing the equivalent of
mainframe software, nor is the history lesson lost on me! ;-)

My original question was a very practical one.  Given today's
browsers, what's the best approach?  Even though I'm usually an
idealist, with web browsers, I usually stick to the *hacks* that work
the best.  innerHTML and XMLHttpRequest are both total hacks, but
they're what makes the world move around these days.

One of the other old-timers in our group, Mike Cheponis, wrote a
particularly humorous anti-web rant, which I posted on my blog.  It's
worth reading: http://jjinux.blogspot.com/2008/06/web-best-anti-web-rant.html

Happy Hacking!
-jj

-- 
In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things
with great love. -- Mother Teresa
http://jjinux.blogspot.com/