The Disappearing Desktop - It's Real This Time

[Chipp Walters]

Dan,

Do you remember Phillips CDI initiative, or the many other CD-ROM 
developer platforms? They all made grand promises but never delivered.

Even more recently, think about Java and it's promise of cross-platform 
clients? Again, everyone had to stop and convert over to Java, but now 
we see it's only a great server tool, not for clients.

Then there is the ubiquitous 'Web Services.' They have been touted by 
the press and media for the past 5 years as the 'new technology', yet we 
still see very little in the way of open web services available to write 
apps around. Certainly not the cornucopia the analysts led us to believe 
was coming.

So, this just seems like another one of the 'jump on the bandwagon' type 
of technologies, which has promise, but doesn't deliver.

And your notions about 'specialized browsers' and discounting Andre's 
server development issues so quickly only points to the great hurdles 
which AJAX still has to make, currently with no visible roadmap.

My suggestion, is try and develop a full AJAX application, then get back 
to us on what you find. My gut tells me it's a lot more difficult than 
doing the same in Rev. For me, just like the other mentioned 
technologies, I'll wait and see.

(Let's see, to develop in AJAX, you probably need to be an expert in the 
following:
Javascript
HTML
CSS
PHP,ASP or JSP
SQL
DOM XML
cross-platform techniques
cross-browser techniques
ODBC

Wow! That's a lot.)

I, too, like the idea of very thin clients. But as you know, they've 
been tried before, and before, and failed. Perhaps the underlying reason 
they fail has nothing to do with software availablility, but rather the 
requirement for some users to work 'off the net' and most users to 'own 
their own data.'

best,
Chipp

Dan Shafer wrote:
> So if most of you on this list disagree with  me and
> go on your merry way, that just means fewer competitors for  those of us 
> who do jump on the AJAX bandwagon while it is still  moving slowly 
> enough for us to stake out positions on its top level.