AjaxOffice / WebOS / Microsoft starts shivering

Many possible titles for this entry on Kottke, and all of them means “start counting microsoft’s remaining days”. This is nothing too new for AjaxOffice-aware people but the article is very well written. A question for you: should the code running this apps be Free Software? I think so. Moreover, Kottke reasons that the entities who can create WebOS are just Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Apple or Mozilla Foundation.
And why not the world community starting for example developing AjaxOffice on Sourceforge?
Oh, yes, I was going to forgot; the titles of the post were:
* GoogleOS? YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS?
* You’re probably wondering why Yahoo bought Konfabulator
* An update on Google Browser, GooOS and Google Desktop
* A platform that everyone can stand on and why Apple, Microsoft, and, yes, even Google will have to change their ways to be a part of it
* The next killer app: desktop Web servers
* Does the Mozilla Foundation have the vision to make Firefox the most important piece of software of this decade?
* Web 3.0
* Finally, the end of Microsoft’s operating system dominance

5 thoughts on “AjaxOffice / WebOS / Microsoft starts shivering”

Francesco Bellomi 25 August 2005 at 1:28 pm

I think the AJAX+XML+JS platform is still too presentation-layer-centric to be used to implement applications that have even a moderately heavy client-side logic (AjaxOffice?).

XUL+JS starts to get more interesting; however, JS is an interesting language but IMHO not (yet) well suited to write large applications. I would love to see a Python or a Ruby engine integrated within Firefox or XUL Runner, that wuold really be a viable foundation for open, cross-platform network-based applications.

Being able to exploit the client (as opposite to heavily rely on the server side) while still being network-based is still an unreolved issue for me.

paolo 26 August 2005 at 8:56 am

I’m not sure. I played recently with javascript, behaviour.js and scriptacolous and i created a drag and drop interface that let you specify associations between objects (the rest of the project is not yet ready to be shown). Anyway, it is very easy, very powerful, cross-platform.
Do you think that Gmail or Gmaps are inherently more complex than AjaxOffice?

Francesco Bellomi 26 August 2005 at 11:45 am

Quite the contrary, I think AO is more complex than Gmail and GMaps. What I mean by “complex” is that both GMa* are “only” (sophisticated) presentation layers upon a server-side application. This is maybe the case of a large number of applications, but not all. Today’s browsers mimick many features of an application platform, by hacking upon an outgrown presentation layer, while missing some important features, like local storage (or even a fine control over local caching), a strictly non-push model (there is no way a server can “signal” a browser, unless the browser is continuouly polling the server), support for “programming in the large” (the only available language is javascript… which has no libraries… except for those related to its use as a presentation layer), no support for vectorial drawing (except a partial SVG support in the upcoming FF 1.5), and I could go on.

However… I’m not “skeptical”, and I am really interested in your experiment. I simply would like to see more work from the community on the “foundational” issues, such as integrating a more complete runtime (python or ruby), rather than on graphical FX.