For solving a host of vexing problems with quiet competence, and for doing it in ways that invite others to stand on their shoulders, I salute them all.
The idea that an application wears its state information on its sleeve, readily available for users to bookmark, modify, and trade, is an underappreciated strength of Web-based software. As the RIA bandwagon picks up steam, let's honor that idea and find a way to move it forward.
The way forward, Geer suggests, is not to abandon ACLs but rather to augment them with aggressive monitoring that holds people accountable for behaviors that can’t economically be permitted or denied.
A few months ago, key Microsoft architects were telling me that it would be impossible to decouple the Avalon presentation subsystem from the Longhorn OS.
...collaborative systems for building a shared database of items, developing a metadata vocabulary about the items, performing metadata-driven queries, and monitoring change in areas of interest.
Discussions about open source and innovation tend to cluster around two opposing memes. One says that open source can't innovate; the other that only open source can innovate. Both are wrong.
Bosworth's hunch is that a Web-style thin client, driven by a rich data model intelligently synchronized with the services cloud, could do most of what we really need -- both offline and online.
Here's a challenge: Let's improve the various functions performed by e-mail without multiplying the interfaces people must learn in order to use those functions.
Fault tolerance, service-level agreements, access control, and business activity monitoring are among the many things enabled by intermediaries that watch (and sometimes transform XML) message flows.
We need HCI (human/computer interface) guidelines more than ever. And we need them not only for Windows, OS X, GNOME, and Flash, but for the uber-platform that subsumes them all.
Clemens Vasters is cofounder and chief technology officer of newtelligence AG, a developer services company focusing on XML Web services and .NET enterprise technologies.
"His current technical interests include alternative transaction models, aspect-oriented programming, statistical modeling of distributed applications, and streaming XML"
"I'm short and I have the remnants of a southern accent," Paul says in a recent interview. Co-founder of Digital Creations, now Zope Corporation, Paul evangelizes the powerful Zope/Python combo.
CTO of Propylon, and previously co-founder of Digotome, Sean has served as an invited expert on W3C committees, and is a widely respected authority on XML.
I'd been experimenting for a few months with Gmail, Google's Web mail system, without really taking it seriously. But this week I decided to take the plunge and try using Gmail not only as a mail search engine, but as a replacement for Outlook (on Windows) and Mail (on OS X). Now I'm ready to join the chorus singing the praises of GMail's user-interface technology. Its combination of HTML, JavaScript, and the DOM makes the browser do some remarkable tricks.
...
As early adopters discovered long before I did, there's an architecture behind this JavaScript/DHTML wizardry. The best description I've found is from Johnvey Hwang, who deconstructed Gmail's JavaScript code and created a .Net-based Gmail API. As Hwang described in his July 5 write-up, Gmail loads a JavaScript UI engine into your browser at the beginning of each session. Oddpost, he noted, was the first Web mail application to perfect this technique. That was a prophetic statement: Just four days later, on July 9, Yahoo acquired Oddpost.
Because Gmail's behavior is embedded in the UI engine, all subsequent interaction between the browser and the Gmail service is just an exchange of data. What Hwang calls the DataPack format is not XML, though; it's JavaScript. When you make a request to the Gmail service, whether to refresh your inbox or to modify the list of labels you can attach to messages, the response is a minimal set of JavaScript function calls and associated data objects that the engine uses to update the display.
...
So is Gmail a rich Internet application? Sure. Although that label most often applies to Java, .Net, and Flash clients, Gmail shows that Web clients can join the club too. But crucially, Gmail's architecture is open to other kinds of rich clients, too. It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
There's been a fair bit of blog commentary about this column. I've also received a number of emails, several noting that even an envelope-pushing Web UI such as Gmail's can be fruitfully enhanced with Java, .NET, or Flash.
I couldn't agree more. This morning, while testing some new screen-recording tools, I cooked up a nice A/B comparison in the application domain of photo sharing. As a test, I made and viewed an album in two1 different applications. Webshots is a straight HTML/JavaScript app2, and Flickr3 is an HTML/Flash hybrid.
I think you'll agree that Flickr's selective and strategic use of Flash is enlightening. So what's this got to do with Gmail and the future of Web UI? I suggest there's no one-size-fits-all solution. In many cases, what will make the most sense is a hybrid application that uses Web 1.0 for all it's worth, pushes the DHTML envelope, and weaves in rich-client technology where it adds the most leverage.
2 Yes, I'm aware that Webshots' strong suit is its downloadable/installable photo management application. For my purposes here, though, I'm just exploring what can be done through the Web and on the fly.
3 Full disclosure: I know, and have hung out with, some of the Flickr folks.
4 I'm still sorting out the tools situation here. Too many players, too many formats, too many moving parts.
 
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