Whoosh! [LWN.net]

Whoosh!

Posted Jul 29, 2010 4:18 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
Parent article: GUADEC: Luis Villa points GNOME at the web

The point of this exercise must have went right over my head. We turn everything into a web app... why?

Is it because making everything a client server ajax app is going to be easier? Not bloody likely. Is it to make it network transparent? Uh, we have had that since day one with X. Cross platform? GNOME/Gtk is already more cross platform that most existing complex web apps.

Making every app aware of URLs, yea that is a good idea.... one that has been implemented to varying degrees of completeness for over a decade.

One thing I can promise. We already lost the netbook war because we were more bloated and slower than Windows XP. We make our desktop slower still and we can cede the tablet and smartphone game to Android and all just learn to write it's mutant flavor of Java.

Is the idea to abandon the local desktop for some cloud based thing? Again, Android is here now. Within another year I fully expect all major distros to support the Android Marketplace and Android apps running seamlessly on current desktops.

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Whoosh!

Posted Jul 29, 2010 5:31 UTC (Thu) by robertm (subscriber, #20200) [Link] (6 responses)

We turn everything into a web app... why?

Because, ultimately, the desktop computer is on the way out. Appliances smartphones, game consoles, DVRs are the future of the computer for end-users outside the workplace. The closest most people will come to a general-purpose personal system will likely be a tablet form-factor system running almost exclusively a browser of some kind. It's important to build applications which are web-aware because within half a decade the vast majority of non-business and a good-sized chunk of professional software is going to be running on a server that the user never sees or in Javascript on the browser.

And unless something happens now, this is going to be a crushing blow to free software for those same end-users. It's gotten solidly entrenched on the server side of things and will probably remain there until a completely unpredictable game-changer comes along to shake things up, but for end users? Completely Tivoized appliances talking to proprietary applications.

And it's a pity, because the web is a mess. It's a horrifying hack atop horrifying hack atop wildly inefficient use of resources atop more horrifying hacks. It is the epitome of "worse is better" when it comes to winning marketshare. But as much as I wish it would go crawl in a corner and die a much-deserved death, it's here to stay.

Whoosh!

Posted Jul 29, 2010 5:41 UTC (Thu) by thedevil (guest, #32913) [Link] (4 responses)

And where/how, in this world, does software get developed? Don't you need some equivalent of either a timeshared shell server or a personal desktop to do development? And development is not just programming in a narrow sense but also stuff like writing technical documentation (think XML by hand), so you need a text editor, creating artwork, so you need an image editor, etc. There is also specialized software for science, text analysis, hundreds of niche areas that will never be served by a lowest common denominator web app.

Whoosh!

Posted Jul 29, 2010 6:30 UTC (Thu) by Tara_Li (guest, #26706) [Link] (3 responses)

I tend to agree. You know, there are times when my computer *doesn't* have a network connection. My ebook reader doesn't really need one - once I have that puppy loaded with a library from Gutenberg, Baen, Webscriptions, and a dozen other ebooks sources, what do I need the web for? To look up some obscure reference in a book? Nice, but I read a lot of books for a long time, before that ever became commonplace. I learned to get the *CONTEXT* of the idea, and work it out from there.

Seriously, just this evening, I was having random inability to get to huge chunks of the Internet - at one point, even Google wouldn't come up for about 30 minutes. If I have nothing local - I have a paperweight on my desktop if my network goes down.

And honestly, the best way to keep a computer virus-free? Don't connect it to the Net!

Whoosh!

Posted Jul 29, 2010 7:53 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

by book reader has a network connection, but most of the time I have it turned off because it gives me so much more battery life.

all these extra layers will work find if you are on a high-powered mains powered system connected to a high-speed, low-latency network connection. but change any of these criteria and the feasability of 'everything is the web' starts falling apart rapidly.

OLPC and the netbooks pointed out to people that there is a backside to moors law, namely the same capability gets cheaper over time. today a few people are willing to pay large sums of money for smartphones. when the same capability that sells today for $600 drops to $100 there will be a _LOT_ more of them around.

if you are on a high-latency network connection (say a satellite feed if you are in rural areas) every round trip to the server is very painful (approximately 1 second)

I already mentioned the battery life issue, radios are expensive to power (and as the power for the rest of the system drops over time, they become even more expensive as a relative cost).

Whoosh!

Posted Jul 29, 2010 10:35 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

Exactly. In my experience it takes about 2-5 seconds to open an e-mail in gmail while with the local pine client it's instant. WWW stands for World Wide Wait. In my experience the latency is simply unacceptable for most web based applications. Reliability is also worse: it's not enough that my computer works, the connection to my ISP must work, the international line of my ISP must work and also the server must not be down. A number of extra components that can broke down.

Whoosh!

Posted Jul 29, 2010 7:56 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> I tend to agree. You know, there are times when my computer *doesn't* have a network connection.

I am one of the most clueless people about web applications going around, but my understanding was that Javascript applications were stored on a remote server but cached and executed locally. Surely with a bit of tweaking (like making sure that the whole application gets cached and not just part of it) it could continue to work once your connection is gone. apt-get normally also initially relies on a network connection.

Whoosh!

Posted Jul 29, 2010 6:35 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link]

> Because, ultimately, the desktop computer is on the way out.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Google was dreaming of ChromeOS, where the browser would be the only local app. Android ate its lunch. Besides handsets there are lots of Android tablets in the pipeline now, probably netbooks soon. Besides the plain fact that a local app is going to outperform a cloud app there is the mercenary fees available when app stores sell downloadable apps that few would pay for access to the same app on a hosted basis. It might be irrational but it is real.

Whoosh!

Posted Jul 29, 2010 10:01 UTC (Thu) by droundy (guest, #4559) [Link] (4 responses)

Is it because making everything a client server ajax app is going to be easier? Not bloody likely. Is it to make it network transparent? Uh, we have had that since day one with X.

I don't know if you've tried running an X application over the network recently. I ran emacs yesterday across the country, and let me tell you, it was painful! We're talking minutes of startup time and perhaps 10 seconds to refresh the screen. I'd be surprised if that's what's going to beat AJAX.

On the other hand, I don't look forward to the bloat of making everything run under the browser, either...

Whoosh!

Posted Jul 29, 2010 10:32 UTC (Thu) by Frej (guest, #4165) [Link]

Launch time can be hurt by server-side fonts, i'm not sure if emacs still uses it. The protocol requires round trips (per font i think....). So it can scale pretty bad with high latency and many fonts.

Remote access protocols

Posted Jul 29, 2010 20:35 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (2 responses)

Thinking about running stuff over X over the the net, I wonder how difficult and strange it would be to implement a version of X that ran in a browser?

With Canvas and/or SVG, combined with Image objects and HTML fragments, an application could send graphics and text and receive keyboard and mouse events.

Lots of stuff wouldn't work, but I bet it could be very interesting.

Actually, isn't there already some version of ExtJS that can render for a Qt backend using signal/slot programming? Pretty sure I read about that somewhere...

Remote access protocols

Posted Aug 2, 2010 0:37 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Dunno if you've seen the VNCs that run in the browser now but that might be close...

http://kanaka.github.com/noVNC/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/thinvnc/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/guacamole/

Remote access protocols

Posted Aug 3, 2010 0:51 UTC (Tue) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

Thinking about running stuff over X over the the net, I wonder how difficult and strange it would be to implement a version of X that ran in a browser?

There's a lovely version called XML11. It implements X11 (some level of it...) in JavaScript with XML messaging, and the demos, at least, were very cool. But that's not all it does: since it's JS-based, it can actually run code locally on the server (i.e., your browser), not just regular X display stuff. The canonical example is a calculator app; the "X11 version" just sends display commands to the browser and accepts events (button pushes, typed numbers, etc.) from it, with the calculations happening on the "client" end (in the X sense--what everybody else calls the server). But the "XML11 version" actually sends some or all of the application code to the browser/server to execute there. I vaguely recall that the X client ("regular server") code was Java-based.

At any rate, my experience with it started with a demo/presentation and ended with some reading of the docs, so I don't really know how complete it is. Looks like development ended about three and a half years ago--unfortunate but not surprising, given its relative lack of publicity. It might be worth resurrecting, though, if web-based X apps intrigue you.

Greg