I'm trying to see it. [LWN.net]

I'm trying to see it.

Posted Nov 29, 2007 1:52 UTC (Thu) by kbob (guest, #1770)
Parent article: Freeing web services with Forkolator

On the face of it, Forkolator sounds like a bad idea.  If you want to remap the user
experience, you can use a browser-side tool like GreaseMonkey.  If the server's owners want to
allow new mashup apps, they can provide application-specific web services APIs.  I'm not sure
how much of a problem Forkolator could solve that those two approaches don't, and it has to
solve pretty compelling problems to be worth the effort and security risks.

But I'll keep an open mind.  I've failed to see the Next Big Thing enough times before...

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agreed

Posted Nov 29, 2007 14:57 UTC (Thu) by ccyoung (guest, #16340) [Link]

running wep apps myself, I put detailed (vs global) security issues at the page level.

since almost all web sql uses global, not individual logins, due to the cost of session
management (or lack of db sophistication), there would need to be an expensive (performance
and development) security layer between the page and the data.

the base idea is great, but for me greasemonkey is the way my users would need to go.  perhaps
on the page I could send a lot of data in hidden or display:none block that they could in turn
enable / disable / rearrange / whatever.  

end users (in my case at the company level) customizing their pages is a very exciting idea -
well beyond my standard offering of customized menus and css properties.

greasemonkey

Posted Nov 30, 2007 9:22 UTC (Fri) by phip (subscriber, #1715) [Link]

I have very limited experience with greasemonkey (actually, only the fancyLWNComments script:
http://lwn.net/Articles/249618/).

The script is awesome, but it is a real pain when reading LWN from multiple computers.  It
would be really cool if I could store the script and associated state somewhere on an LWN
server, so that it is automatically downloaded and executed on my computer whenever I login to
LWN.  Extra credit if it can be made to work without installing greasemonkey on the computer
I'm surfing from.

This could give a fairly big chunk of what Forkolator is trying to achieve, without executing
user code on the servers.