Hi, Seeing the growth of web applications (if you want to see some cool webapp for instance, have a look to the 7 minutes dabbledb demo at http://dabbledb.com/utr/ ) and the omnipresence of the web into our daily computer life, I'm wondering how a traditional desktop fits in, and specially, what étoilé should do...
After all, if more and more applications move on the web, with UI improving a lot thanks to tricks like xmlrpc+javascript (we even start to see "office"-like applications...), what's the point in working on a "traditionnal" environment ? Well, first we need to define what's so nice about webapps :-) -- they are OS independant and language independant -- they don't need to be installed -- they don't need backup, or update, everything is done without you worrying about it -- they are ubiquitous : no need to carry your laptop anymore to read your mails... Now, what's bad about webapps ? well... a lot.. :-) -- they are slow -- they are inconsistent -- they are not integrated with your normal environment -- the web is not meant to do that :-) -- and that's why it's so gruesome to code webapps (but with things like seaside... that's doable without that much efforts) and to work with them as a user sometimes (high latency, etc) Yet, it's obvious that webapps won't go anywhere, they are here to stay. Mostly because they are so convenient for programmers/companies, even if a bit painful to write (no deployment problems, etc), and convenient as well for users. So everybody will accept some pain waiting for a good enough webapp (think, gmail.. honestly I'm not even using my local mail client anymore, simply because, moving from home/lab/friends/trainstations, anyway i'll be able to access my mail.. and apparently I'm not the only one in that case ^_^) So what do we want to do for Étoilé, if webapps are so convenient and will take the world ? Well, as I said above, webapps aren't /that/ great as soon as you want a fast interaction (no way to have a photoshop-like online... unless all the pictures are also online, which after all isn't a completely far-fetched possibility...), or low latency, or lots of datas needed to be exchanged, or make different (web-)applications interact together. So a "standard" environment has still a lot of things to do :-) where it's much better than would be a complete "web environment" consisting uniquely of webapps. [ although people used to the low interaction in such environment as windows could still be sold to this idea --- google OS, here you are ! ... ] ehem. So I still think that a pure client environment like Étoilé has more than its place. But. We can see from the list above that we should certainly try to push in Étoilé some of the good things that a web environment provide: -- we should simplify installation / update (like the rss update scheme...) -- we should have an easy, desktop-wide mechanism to do backup/synchronization of your data and configuration -- which means it should be easy to "share" a desktop among different computers. -- we should facilitate as much as possible data exports to standard formats such as ical, vcards, etc. with an easy way of publishing things on the web eg, the general rule should be to not tied users to étoilé, but to the contrary, allow a maximum sharing. On the other hand, we certainly wants things to be _better_ if using étoilé than something else ;-) The other main idea is that I think the web should be integrated much more than it is into étoilé. What I mean is that it should be possible to consider "web apps" as.. applications; pages as documents, etc. For instance, we should have something like a "transform this page into an application" menu in a browser (ok, we need a browser first ^_^) that would create an application bundle containing the url, plus cookies, passwords, cache, etc. And you could carry that "application" anywhere. And double-clicking that app would simply start the page into a simplified browser window showing just the page. Another thing would be to have some kind of framework able to easily parse webpages so we could create applications that would integrate easily with websites (eg, a flickr client app, etc) Obviously and as usual lately, I'm not really active code-wise (that pesky phd to finish and plain old procrastination), so I'm not sure when I'll work on that kind of stuff, but I wanted to write a mail trying to detail a bit my ideas and to gather people comments about them... Do you think it would be a good goal for étoilé ? if so, do you have specific ideas on how to actually implement it ? or other related ideas ? Thanks ;-) -- Nicolas Roard "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -- Douglas Adams _______________________________________________ Etoile-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev
