13 December 2004

Joe, Robert and I went to New York over the weekend. Joe and Robert both posted photos of me sleeping on the train rides to and from New York. What can I say, I need my sleep; my personality has a lot of overhead.

The Evolution hackers are throwing an EPlugin hackfest on Thursday, the 16th. Join in and add a cool feature to Evolution!

Here comes the web

Gmail and Google Suggest have begun to lift the wool of obstinance from the eyes of the old-school fat client nerds, and people are realizing that the latest incarnations of JavaScript/DHTML/CSS really are good enough for many purposes. Users notice and care less and less whether your app is built as a local client or on “the web platform.”

Fig 1. Breathing on the lens in cold weather.

This is showing up first in web interfaces to groupware servers, with calendar appointments you can drag and drop, quick interactive use, and other features that were supposed to be clunky or impossible in browser-space. Besides Gmail, I’ve seen a few of these lately that have made my jaw drop. MS Exchange’s high-quality “web” interface (called “Premium”) is implemented with special IE extensions, and I’m not talking about that.

This calls into question the need for things like XUL and Flash as a client platform (XUL will always be useful to extend Firefox and Flash to do animations). Why use XUL to build a richer experience for your web app if you can get most of the way there with JS/CSS/DHTML and it will run on all browsers?

I’m surprised no one’s started an open source effort to build a GMail-like web interface to mail. The open source web interfaces for OGo and things like SquirrelMail could really benefit from being brought into the modern era.

Markup is really a nice way to lay out and tweak UI, and that’s why we used it in Dashboard and Beagle. But these are still thick apps that happen to take advantage of some web technologies.

Of course, markup isn’t the only advantage of web-based apps. The main one is the centralized deployment model, the lack of dependencies/DLL hell, the ease of backup/configuration/etc.

It’s interesting to watch the traditional application-and-platform developers (Apple, Microsoft, the Linux desktop projects) parade down the “web will never be good enough for real applications” path. Apple has Sherlock, MS has Avalon/XAML, we have Gtk/Qt/XUL/etc. Meanwhile you find more and more outlying app developers writing web apps. I wonder if, in a few years, we will look like withered old timers to the new armies of web application devleopers. Clinging to our dated ways. “I like my trackball just fine, sonny!”