Web apps, Microsoft, Mozilla/Firefox

I really like writing web apps: for straight forward things, I almost always use Java, but I love the freedom to also use Common Lisp, Scheme, and Smalltalk. I love having control of required data, being able to use huge databases without installing anything on the client, etc.

I used to love coding GUIs: in the early 1980s on my Xerox Lisp Machine, then the Mac, Windows... - lots of fun. But as I get older, I care more for solving real problems, and care less for flashiness in software.

I just installed the latest Firefox 0.9 on two of my Macs - very nice, but most exciting because I look at Mozilla/Firefox as becoming a standard web application platform, Microsoft be damned. I have not tried it, but I believe that Mozilla/Firefox runs very well under Windows :-)

Trouble with Microsoft (I am being inspired here by a thread over on Slashdot - especially a post by GPLDAN): we need a standards (XHTML, Javascript) based platform for the client side of web apps - Mozilla/Firefox could meet that need.

I understand that it is in Microsoft's interest's to block web app development, but I think that we can do an end run around them :-)

Also: ever notice how well your web apps run on a local area network (high bandwidth, no latency to speak of)? Just think about faster IPV6 versions of the Internet with better security, more bandwidth, less latency. Web applications will become even more important in the future. All of this is not in Microsoft's interests - expect some kicking and screaming!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a way,
Read more

Ruby Sinatra web apps with background work threads

In Java-land, I have often used the pattern of writing a servlet with an init() method that starts up one or more background work threads. Then while my web application is handling HTTP requests the background threads can be doing work like fetching RSS feeds for display in the web app, perform periodic maintenance like flushing old data from a database, etc. This is a simple pattern that is robust and easy to implement with a few extra lines of Java code and an extra servlet definition in a web.xml file. In Ruby-land this pattern is even simpler to implement: require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' $sum = 0 Thread.new do # trivial example work thread while true do sleep 0.12 $sum += 1 end end get '/' do "Testing background work thread: sum is #{$sum}" end While the main thread is waiting for HTTP requests the background thread can do any other work. This works fine with Ruby 1.8.7 or any 1.9.*, but I would run this in JRuby for a lon
Read more