Jim,
Thanks for your interesting comments about the Sidewinder Web Application
Viewer.
(The first part of your email is dealt with in a separate reply.)
> ... you also don't mention
> any sort of future licensing constraints, the current
> licence is completely useless - I can download it and install
> it on one machine, and one machine only - I can't even deploy
> it enough on my own boxes for testing, let alone ship it out
> to users, without that sort of thing spelt out now,
> evaluating doesn't seem as useful.
I guess it's your right to be as critical as you like, but the whole thing
is clearly marked as a "preview" -- it's not for deployment. And the reason
we released it is because there is so much discussion floating around at the
moment about:
* so-called 'web applications';
* ways to combine XHTML, SVG, and XForms;
* MIME types on documents that have this
combination;
* JavaScript-rich clients, and how to manage
the spaghetti.
It feels to me that much of the discussion on combining languages like
XForms and SVG takes place with the idea that these are 'future problems',
so we thought it was important to show people what was possible today, in
order to show also that many issues need to be resolved sooner rather than
later. We also thought it worth demonstrating how script can be
compartmentalised using XBL in a way that is pretty much impossible with
most of the solutions to web applications that are currently on offer.
With the Sidewinder Viewer, we've made it so that you can create a document
that contains XHTML plus SVG, XForms, and MathML, and it just works -- no
object tags, HTC files, or whatever. You can even refer to XBL files using
<link>. This means that, for example, SVG files that work in Opera 8+ (the
subject of another thread on this list at the moment) should also work in
Sidewinder, with no change. The same would go for a Firefox build that
supports SVG -- with the advantage over Opera that Mozilla and Sidewinder
can support XForms ;) ...
Anyway, I thought you might be pleased at such a prospect!
> I think you should look hard at using Zeepe for this, which
> is already an excellent IE based Application platform, and
> will render XForms using your forms player natively. It also
> contains lots of very useful stuff, and is
> very mature. Drop Jerry a line [EMAIL PROTECTED] I
> think it could be a
> lot more productive than re-inventing your own application
> viewer, they're very nice guys.
Why do you assume I haven't? I've looked at a lot of Internet
Application-related stuff in the last four or five years -- and I've looked
at a hell of a lot of software in the last 26 years!
I have always liked what the Zeepe guys have done -- and as you say, they
are "nice guys", and the software is "an excellent IE based Application
platform".
But there are very many differences between what the Sidewinder Viewer does,
and what they have done. A clue to one of those differences is in your
description -- "IE based Application platform"; their goal is to give more
power to IE, and they do that admirably. But the Sidewinder architecture is
not at all dependent on IE. We have a modular architecture that can switch
in different 'renderers', and 'renderers' can in turn use other 'renderers'
for their output. This allows us to do things like tidy up CSS, add other
output languages, and even convert the entire source document to speech or
SVG, and not even touch IE.
Our whole focus is on making standards work together, so that the same
document will run on many platforms. For example, we support interfaces on
'document' such that when you want to create an object in your script, you
don't use:
var x = new ActiveXObject("mycompany.myobject"):
Instead you use:
var x = document.DOMImplementation.getFeature("SVG", "1.0");
This leverages our implementation of the DOM 3 Implementation Registry, and
makes the creation of any object vendor-independent, as well as working on
any platform that properly supports DOMImplementation -- regardless of OS or
browser. (And an interesting side-effect of this technique is that since you
can only create objects that 'document.DOMImplementation' has instantiated a
factory for, it doesn't open up the entire machine to the script, making it
actually more secure than many other security techniques used.)
As I said, I think Zeepe is very good, so none of this is a criticism of the
software per se; I'm trying to tackle the broader themes that concern web
applications more generally, but obviously I am obliged to refer to Zeepe
because you raised it. (And I certainly don't want to drag them into a
discussion that they didn't start!)
Anyway, with all those caveats -- in my mind it is very significant that the
vast majority of the things we have done relate to using standards, whilst
Zeepe have actually written their own language to hold the whole thing
together, and worse, it is very IE-specific. I'm not sure I need to provide
any other illustrations to show why we have a completely different
philosophy, but I could.
Just whilst we're on the subject of our approach, if anything we're closer
to what the Mac guys are doing with Dashboard [1] -- their goal is to use
XHTML+CSS+JS pretty much without modifications. My approach is pretty
similar, but with the big advantage of using SVG and XForms, which makes our
applications potentially more powerful, with much less dependent on
scripting. (And the other advantage of our approach is that you can use the
web applications all the time, whereas currently Dashboard is a separate
application that is closed and opened in its own right, onto which the
'widgets' are layered.)
Anyway, it seems that these issues will run and run, and it's a great thing
to get them out into the open for discussion, so thanks for the opportunity.
Regards,
Mark
[1] <http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/dashboard.html>
Mark Birbeck
CEO
x-port.net Ltd.
e: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
t: +44 (0) 20 7689 9232
w: http://www.formsPlayer.com/
b: http://internet-apps.blogspot.com/
Download our XForms processor from
http://www.formsPlayer.com/
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