Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

> The model of using CGI programs run by a central apache from user's home directory is probably not in the future.

Indeed, it isn't.

Here's how it should be instead: When person goes to use a remote app, they point their browser at the URL for the host where that app resides and the pathname on that host where the app is installed; for example "http://hostname/bin/my_app.py". Then, the user enters their authentication credentials (use HTTP digest or basic authentication for this) for that remote host. Then, any subsequent HTTP requests from that user will be forwarded (by SCGI or AJP or similar) to an instance of that app running as that user's UID. So, the Web app is installed in just one location, but there will be multiple running instances of the app, one instance per user. (Think about what happens with, for example, a host running an SSH server where many user log in via SSH and then run various console apps and X apps. It's the same principle: apps are installed system-wide, and there's a separate running instance of each app for each user using the app.)

> enable browsers to execute applications without a web server

I think this is already possible. (If you've got the Python documentation installed, try going to "/usr/share/doc/python/html/index.html" in a browser, type something in the search box, and press "Go".) But I wasn't talking about running web applications locally.

> I don't think anybody is going to actually do desktop apps in the web browser.

The trouble is, some people here are saying that we don't need X Window System anymore, because we don't need X's network-transparency anymore, because we have a better way to use apps remotely: Web apps. But, with X, most apps that you can run locally (image editor, text editor, etc.) you can also run remotely, and lots of people use this feature. That won't be possible if those apps migrate to a non-networked UI system (e.g. Wayland).

If we're really going to adopt HTTP + HTML5 + (whatever else) as the replacement for remote X, we've got to have these same kinds of apps available for it!