Ahem,
thanks for giving the RIAA enough evidence to lock you up for good 
Funny random fact: did you know that Torrent’s UI was written in Visual Cobol? I shit you not, check the FAQ on the site.
The CRM application I use has been doing AJAX like stuff since it was released serveral years ago. However, due to the amount of data that needs to be pushed in the application, they have determinited that HTML (web) is not the best option for them going forward. They are totally rewriting their application using .NET 3.0 and Smart Forms.
https://www.youos.com/ click on the Try A Demo link to give it a spin.
Amazing what you can do in just JavaScript…
The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language http://www.crockford.com/javascript/javascript.html
Worse is better.
Visual Cobol? WTF?!!
I’m pretty sure that for many applications, a JavaScript + declarative markup approach works. For what I’m currently working on, I use XULRunner, which is the platform the next generation of Firefox will be built on. Mostly it’s very good - you can use FF2 and Firebug to debug, but not having the capability to get down into the bits on some of more complicated parts is a bit of a pain. The Mozilla JavaScript implementation is being rewritten to share the Flash 9 runtime’s JIT engine, which should give a significant performance boost. Choosing between Flash and XUL is partly a matter of whether you want a DOM rather than a display list, and partly whether you want to distribute the runtime for a standalone product, which you can’t do with Flash - though you probably will be able to with Adobe Apollo, which is there contender in the rich-non-internet-app-based-on-internet-languages space.
If you don’t want to be locked into using Windows, currently use XUL rather than XAML.
Can’t wait to here about the court case on your blog, but in the mean time the link at the bottom of the article appears to be broken.
I think it is sad that people are so slow adopting the mozilla technology, mostly due to the lack of a serious IDE and documentation I guess. But it is really nice to see that Joost like Songbird is using the technology of SVG, XUL, XForm etc. http://newteevee.com/2007/01/11/venice-project-mozilla/. Wish I had more time to mess with XUL, but the .Net development seems to take all my time, so I probably have to wait like the rest of the world for the Microsoft version of the technology.
Link works fine for me.
Have you tried Flex? It’s an Adobe product, basically a library, compiler and IDE on top of Flash, that makes it an applcation developer tool. It’s been quite impressive in my brief proofs of concept. Flex 2 really seems to have come into its own.
It has a GUI component model, it comes with a large number of components built-in, it has a “real” language (actionscript 3 is javascript but with a more robust object model added), and you can compile your Flex files to a .swf file with the free SDK (you don’t need to buy the IDE if you’re a language maven).
http://www.quietlyscheming.com/blog/ – blog by a Flex developer
http://examples.adobe.com/flex2/inproduct/sdk/explorer/explorer.html – Flex app that lets you explore the built-in Flex components
http://flexbox.mrinalwadhwa.com/ – Flex app that lists all non-Adobe components floating around in the net
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/ – official site
The thing I struggle with when it come to more desktop-like web user experiences is how to serve all the masses. If you pin your hopes on Javascript, you alienate at least 10% of the browser market based on the W3C estimates on the number of people who turn it off. Then there’s the browser compatibility and accessibility issues to deal with.
Flash, as several people have pointed out, is a good cross-browser environment, but it can be slow and you sell your soul to Adobe. a href="http://disney.com"Disney/a recently went almost all-Flash and their implementation looks really slick, unless you don’t speak English or if you are accessing it over a handheld device.
And that’s the other thing to consider. Depending upon where your market is, handheld can be huge. In places like Korea, there are more handheld users than wired users, so how do you have a great user experience for both browser and handheld without alienating either one or having to build your stuff twice?
Maybe you can’t have it all. Gmail went the route of going huge on AJAX for the browser experience and built a completely separate client for handheld. The didn’t tackle the acessibility issues, but maybe they are leading the way with this too.
—Pete
a href="http://nerdguru.net"http://nerdguru.net/a
I use X11 tunneling with SSH a few times a week to remotely run KATE from my universities server.
It’s a bit sluggish at times, but usually its pure KDE UI goodness!
X11 was made for that sort of thing from the ground up… Hence its client-server architecture. Pure X11 goodness is what you probably should be saying 
web based user interfaces are, as their name implies, only user interfaces.
actually, it is possible to define a new language (or whatever else) that could standardize web-based UI accross web browsers: all that is needed is the effort to really standardize it and push for a wide-spread adoption. it seems nobody really wants to start such an effort these days.
but a web based UI can be compared to a remote desktop. we are observing the return of time-sharing mainframes and dumb terminals.
the only difference is that the dumb terminal is less and less dumb.
Remote Desktops are alive and well. I use them everyday.
I use two computers at work. I sit in front of a Windows machine, and I use VNC to connect to a Linux machine. It’s a sweet setup, since I can use Windows when I want and use Linux when I want. Cut and paste is a little unreliable, but that’s life – it would be worse with a KVM switch.
I have to admit that it’s been a decade or so that I’ve used remote X Windows – there’s just never any reason. On UNIX you’ve got a choice between (1) command-line apps that “just work” and let you get the job done and (2) GUI apps that almost work and mostly waste your time. If I need to do something remotely, I could finish the job with a type 1 app in the time it would take to get the remote desktop connection working right.
“Thin clients” for protocols like X and RDP have always been a nonstarter. The problem you’ve got is that a “thin client” has to be cheap, otherwise people aren’t going to buy it. Even if a weirdo machine has a price point a little more than a PC, it will probably have 1/4 the RAM and 1/10 the CPU power because the components aren’t produced in the volume PC components are. In 1999 I had a ‘thin client’ on my desk; the damn thing had barely enough RAM for a video buffer and it was painful to use.
“Agree. Kind of odd that Flash has been around so long, and yet uptake for developing full blown applications in the browser is pretty dismal. It’s sort of like Linux and Desktop UI: if it hasn’t happened by now, will it ever?”
Yeah, it strikes me as really strange too. Like others are saying, there really hasn’t been much of a consistent and powerful framework for Flash programmers to take advantage of. Its only since the likes of Flex and the upcoming Apollo work that things will get interesting in this space. Perhaps thats the reason.
What do others think?
I think that there is definitely a place for Flash, particularly as components within a web application. Im just unsure as to how much I need to invest in flash to create full blown apps. If Flash doesn’t really offer me anything useful that I cannot achieve without it, doesn’t that make sense?
I particularly like some of the comments on how people should be avoiding the mistakes of the desktop and developing new types of interfaces. Thats a good argument and I would like to think people are starting to think outside the confines of desktop apps ON TOP OF their thinking outside of standard HTML. However, the other side of that story is that a desktop-like interface is consistent. The metaphor is a well known one, so we can generally rely on people knowing how to use the interface to access the functionality of the app.
Sidenote: I think the linux desktop is a reality. I just think it offers people another option and another style of computing. Its still got its problems - even now.
“None of this bodes well for Microsoft and the profits it enjoyed thanks to its API power. The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the application development marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing.”
I think Joel is forgetting that a great way to make html “sing” is to use ASP.NET, which is still MS. I think they’ll be fine.
Our call tracking software is completely web based, and works quite well. Granted the UI sucks, but that’s the designer’s fault… not the technology’s. Almost everything I write at work is also web based, it’s just so much easier to distribute everything when all I have to do is send a url to anyone who needs it.
Like someone else mentioned though, I definately wouldn’t want to use a web interface for “real programs” like Visual Studio or even Word. They are fine for some things, but the load times between screens and losing certain keyboard commands would drive me nuts!
I hope XUL becomes popular, it’s the thing that web UI’s need.
If you don’t believe me check this out (must use a browser that can handle XUL):
http://faser.net/mab/chrome/content/mab.xul
ICR - Every computer with Vista also has Net 3.0.
Look at the lag time between when MS invented the XML request technology behind AJAX. It wasn’t called AJAX then but later became the hot thing. I have wondered why ASP.NET wasn’t built to take advantage of these features from the beginning.
Sooner or later most people will have Net 3.0. (Unless Apple makes a miraculous comeback.)
Yes, we know that Bruce Eckel used to think in Java but now he thinks in Flash. Flash on the web reminds me very much of those old Applet days. I thought Applets were great. They certainly had many limitations but didn’t try to take a document - rich app like HTML/AJAX/etc.
Jobs is right though - applets are dead. We recently ported a customers system from Applets to plain Servlets.
Pity; If applets had had the same attention from Sun that Adobe gives Flash, who know where they might be know?