On 8/23/06, Chuck Stickelman <cstickelman@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
While I was at Miami Systems, I was attempting to write a very complex application in JavaScript. The goal was to build one or more CD's that had user data in XML and use my searching and indexing tool to view the composed, printable piece as a PDF. It was considered my some to be fanciful, others thought I was just totally nuts! The theory was that you can not (and possibly, should not) write complex applications in JavaScript.
Well, the industry has finally caught up to me!! (Yes, I AM *that* humble...) We now call it AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.
Here's a link to a site that features several applications written in JavaScript (or ECMAScript for you purists...)
http://www.myajaxos.com/
The whole point of this, of course, is to wrap the JavaScript in a bit of HTML and then have your browser do all of the rendering. It's an interesting approach, for sure. There are trade-offs, as always. JavaScript is an interpreted language, so all of the weaknesses that come with that are still here... The benefits are that any HTML-aware browser could be your platform for running the applications. The code executes locally, so you still need some horse-power on the client end, and if you're saving documents locally, you'll need some sort of filesystem. But that's about it. If you were interested in thin-client computing, you could find (or write) a browser that uses a graphics library like SVGALib and even do this without X! An embedded device could run the exact same apps as a full-blown PC!
It's cool stuff, and a direction the industry has been exploring for a long time.
Now if I could only find someone with some $$ to pay me to finish my project from 2 years ago... Imagine a variable document creation system on a CD!! That would have to be worth *something*... Combine that with Mike Bell's work on PDF creation via PHP and we're on to something. So I guess that $$ source is going to need to pay both Mike's and my salaries... Know anyone with 6 figures burning a hole in their pockets?
Chuck
PS Basically my project used a PDF form and XML data in a format that Adobe calls XFDF to add variable information into a static page. Mike's project was to build a PDF from scratch using PHP. Combine the two and imagine the possibilities. And neither of us are programmers!!
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Gmail is all I can say. To my knowledge it's ajax. Sad to say that it isn't truely platform browser independant though. For any that haven't tried/used gmail I have plenty of invites left if you want to check it out.
I've loathed every webmail client that I've seen in the past. Probably the coolest feature for me is that with a supported browser you can drive it without the mouse. J and K move you up and down the message list. Those to are natural for any one that has spent more than 5 minutes in vi.
I saw the stuff Chuck was working on and it was nice. Some of it was over my head at the time, could probably muddle my way through it now. After Chuck saw what I was doing it progressed. The last piece that I did was to fill a PDF form. My bit was using fdf though instead of xfdf. The tools that I could get to build and run cleanly didn't handle xfdf, so I went with fdf. In the big picture using xfdf would have added overhead that wasn't needed for the end result. This where fairly disparete projects though.
Even though I'm not a programmer that was some fun stuff. I think some sleep was lost and maybe some sanity. A great lear ning experiance none the less. Trying to explain it makes it sound dry to most. It's really much more interesting to dig in there and figure it out.
