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- You may also want to look at the open source M/DB:X which is an HTTP-interfaced hybrid JSON/Native XML Database. JSON objects are converted to and stored as XML DOMs which can be analysed,...
- Very cool, will watch its progress on github :) I like the Sinatra-esque lightweight approach.
- check out http://github.com/visionmedia/express/tree/master might like ;), I just started it but contribution would be great, building a framework on node.js is sexxxxy
- True, I plan to make some updates, the first of which is to use POST on the /join URL and enforce it. Also, I will implement a reaper process to clear stale joins.
- Nice article! But a very bad idea to show HTTP example code completely ignoring request verbs. People will copy that :-/ And don't make people join on GET, use PUT to join, DELETE to unjoin.
10 months ago
10 months ago
Firefox has been at this for several years now, and IE has been at it for well more than a decade. Isn't a little bit self-important to predict *right now* that Google Chrome is so much better (or even, foreseeably, *will be*) that we know that Adobe shareholders should start cashing out their stocks now because the fatal blow has been dealt?
The fact is, Google Chrome will be good for the industry, and will serve a niche market (those who use and rely on Gears for multiple applications on a regular basis) very well. It'll also help to keep Firefox on its toes (something IE has failed miserably at). I expect there will be a long drawn out shooting match between mozilla and google, and in the end, they'll both end up sharing some of the market share shedding from MS.
But I see nothing to believe that it'll completely replace the other browsers. Even if that were plausible, you'd have to admit it's a *long way* off (10 years or more!). And I'd be making the same argument if (and did, when) FF came out with a new browser (version) that was supposedly the new, big IE-slayer. The fact is, in technology, that rarely happens with free software. The major patterns we see in the short history of modern technology suggest that economic market pressure is what primarily "kills" off one competing technology or another. If you have IE, FF, and Chrome, all free (one of which is so "free" as to be guaranteed on a huge set of operating systems), then what leverage (other than cool, efficient performance) will any one of the three ever have to kill off the other?
And so, if we admit that, at least for the forseeable future, there will continue to be a hybrid mix of browser technologies that real, viable, targetable end-users (not just intranet employees) out in the wild may and will use, then we as content developers will have to continue (for the forseeable future) to leverage the technologies that are broad enough to reach all our audience, not just the "hipsters" who jump on board whenever a new browser comes around.
What are they? Well... html is ubiqitous. javascript (a good subset thereof) is ubiqitous. flash is ubiquitous. java is pretty widespread (some might consider it arguably ubiqitous). silverlight probably will be there someday.
Gears? uuhhhhh. no. not ubiquitous. and it's got a long way to go. chrome? brand new, way too early to tell.
I'm quite certain that the lion share of my career will be in a world where I have to consider what I can leverage to get to the most people. I don't ever foresee myself making a page that says "Sorry, you don't have Chrome/Gears, so you can't see this page."
But, keep dreaming of the day when that's the case. Talk to me in 10 years, and we'll see.
10 months ago
From limited testing over about 2-3 hours I could noticeably tell a difference in performance running Gmail, Google Docs, Google analytics, and google reader in separate tabs as opposed to doing this on firefox.
This tells me that their javascript engine technology is superior to others out there - and since it is open source, I can imagine a scenario where other browsers, especially mozilla, adopt this engine.
So, google chrome may never ever gain market share but I'm willing to bet their javascript technology will! This is what bodes poorly for Adobe in my opinion - a new browser market that isn't dominated by Chrome per se, but is dominated by fast and multi-threaded javascript engines!
9 months ago
But then again, even if we granted that Chrome, and Firefox, and Safari/Webkit *all* adopted this V8 engine... microsoft surely won't ever touch it. And again, for the forseeable future, content authors are not going to be able to make decisions that largely ignore (or marginalize) such a big share of the end-user community.
Will there be plenty of niche applications which target the speed and efficiency that V8 (and others) can achieve? Yeah. And will those same engines certainly speed up a lot of the other apps that are deliberately cross-browser for the mainstream? Yeah.
But that's still a far cry from saying that just because some (or even a good share) of the browsers out there *can* run javascript faster that content authors will be able to ignore microsoft's share and develop apps which run great, but only on 50% of user's machines, and on the other 50% run crappy. No, the truth is, for a long while, they'll still have to leverage technology which is consistent (albeit less performant, and certainly less "open") for the broad audience.
I don't think V8 will reduce flash's share. What I think it *will* do is force them to keep up with improvements in performance and broad browser delivery -- something they've been at for quite awhile.
And what's great is that this will be good for the overall web community. Just don't be so quick to uninstall that flash plugin yet! :)
9 months ago
web developers in general because it does force Adobe to keep up with speed
and accessibility of ajax in flash.
In response to your Microsoft point - they don't necessarily have to adopt
Google's technology for V8 to have an affect on Adobe. Since MS and Google
are so competitive, I can see a scenario where Microsoft comes out with
their own new-fangled js engine that touts more and better features than V8
etc, etc. This will lead to the web tech conversation switching tone from
"ajax vs flash" to "google's js tech vs MS's js tech". This is bad for
Adobe.
I do agree with you that flash isn't going anywhere even in this scenario.
It's all up to Adobe and where they take the platform.
8 months ago
But honestly, I doubt MS will try to get into that game. They may surprise us, but I'd imagine they are quite a ways behind. I suspect they will try to prevent the game from being a "my JS versus your JS" kind of a game, because that's one they'll probably lose, going up against the open-source community.
10 months ago
See:
http://dominogavin.blogspot.com/2008/09/why-mic...
10 months ago
10 months ago
very interesting point of view. Although I don't think that HTML+AJAX can compete Flash and especially Silverlight becase HTML doesn not have rich presentation capabilities and coding with DOM and JavaScript isn't very powerful compared to C#, xaml programming that Silverlight offers. HTML was just build for something else. So I definitely think that for truly rich application like ones we run on our desktop, some plugin be it Flash or Silverlight is necessary at least in mid term. Anyway, good article.
10 months ago
9 months ago