Web OSes: There Are Really Or Just a Fully-Featured Web Site

[Nathan]

The problem with web apps is that Html, Css, and especially Javascript are terribly inefficient for doing that type of thing. I am a million, trillion times more productive using Silverlight than I am using HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript. RIA is simply a breeze when you don't sacrifice performance for the sake of ubiquity.

Yeah, but Silverlight needs to have a runtime installed, HTML, CSS and JavaScript don't.

[NelsonC]

However the runtime is a one time 5.37mb install. The process is done in something like a minute.
You're right though, replacing Javascript with C#, SVG/HTML with XAML pretty much modernizes the web beyond belief.

What exactly is so attractive about Javascript? I absolutely want to rip my heart out when using it.

Realistically, no standard, markup, or runtime does streaming video as well as Silverlight, none do animation with the performance of Silverlight, none have a markup language which maps almost 1:1 with the .NET object model like Silverlight, .. it's just a whole other world of development when you step into the runtime.

[JackScott]

Silverlight is a Microsoft product. I have enough trouble getting Flash to work properly on Linux. No thankyou.

You even mentioned it yourself: "No standard [...]". The web relies on standards. That's how the whole web thing works. One person creates some content how they like it to look, and everybody can see that content how it was meant to be seen.

[NelsonC]

Silverlight is a Microsoft product. I have enough trouble getting Flash to work properly on Linux. No thankyou.

You even mentioned it yourself: "No standard [...]". The web relies on standards. That's how the whole web thing works. One person creates some content how they like it to look, and everybody can see that content how it was meant to be seen.

A lot of these so called "standards" were proprietary first. It always takes a pioneer to break tradition. Not to mention that the CLI and XAML are actually standardized.

However, this is not the point of my argument. The point is that the antiquated technologies of the web need to go. Javascript any way that you slice it, no matter how much performance you squeeze out of it, will never match the performance of Silverlight. It's just now approaching anything anywhere near it, to be honest.

Additionally, your last sentence is troubling, because as ideal as that situation sounds, it is currently not the case. There are heavy ambiguities even in the standards, and the long cumbersome process of clarifying this will take years, and vendors are not going to wait years, so you're going to end up with differences in rendering using the same markup.

The embarassing state of affairs can be observed when you look at the differing implementations of border-radius in the modern browser. A blog post on the Internet Explorer blog really showed how varying the situation is.

I am advocating for a much tighter integration with these modern features, remove the runtime and integrate them directly into the browser. Replace HTML as a whole with XAML. Replace Javascript as a whole with C#.

Everything which will take until the next decade to come to fruition via the W3C's monolithic process has already been done by Microsoft and others. Let's be pragmatic.

[Colonel Kernel]

The cloud is nothing new, it's just an extension and resurrection of an older paradigm. As it has died before, so it will die again.

You're looking at the technical paradigm only. Cloud computing represents a new business paradigm too: Utility computing. Companies are contemplating outsourcing their entire IT infrastructure to "cloud OSes" managed by third parties (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, SalesForce.com) because of the potential cost savings. Whether this is a good idea or not remains to be seen, but it's unlike anything that's happened before in this industry.

On the technical side, there is also a big difference: Scale. A mainframe was just one machine with probably tens of users (maybe hundreds). Client/server ala 10-15 years ago would involve maybe hundreds of machines and thousands of users. Cloud computing involves tens of thousands of machines and millions of users. The kind of engineering that goes into a system of that size is unprecedented -- not just for developing "Cloud apps", but for managing the datacenters themselves.

With tens of thousands of machines, hardware failures become very common. It's impractical and expensive to have an army of sysadmins ready to deal with such failures 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all over the world. The datacenters now have to manage themselves -- automatically taking servers out of rotation, bringing up spares, deploying the right code to them, handle rolling upgrades, etc. All this magic that everyone here seems to take for granted is what goes into a "Cloud OS".

[Benk]

Silverlight is a Microsoft product. I have enough trouble getting Flash to work properly on Linux. No thankyou.

You even mentioned it yourself: "No standard [...]". The web relies on standards. That's how the whole web thing works. One person creates some content how they like it to look, and everybody can see that content how it was meant to be seen.

Moonlight is the open source version...

[Benk]

The problem with web apps is that Html, Css, and especially Javascript are terribly inefficient for doing that type of thing. I am a million, trillion times more productive using Silverlight than I am using HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript. RIA is simply a breeze when you don't sacrifice performance for the sake of ubiquity.

Yeah, but Silverlight needs to have a runtime installed, HTML, CSS and JavaScript don't.

Java script needs a runtime which your browser normally provides , no reason a browser cant provide flash or Silverlight out of the box.

[Benk]

The funny thing about OS's that try to remove the "native" aspect of an OS onto a website inside a web browser.. is they're all starting to offer "native" SDK's, as an example, both Android (Java) and WebOS (Javascript/HTML, AJAX) support running code to access features of the processor directly for "speed".

The whole "Web Operating System" and "Cloud Computing" trend is a farce, you will always need low level code and a traditional operating system.. and limiting exposure to the OS through "safe" high level interpreters is just going to annoy everyone, and add to the ridiculous complexity of it all.. security through layers of cheese.

So in conclusion, a WebOS is a fancy website.. with no practical purpose, except some fancy buzzwords.

The speed aspect only rellies to the implementation of Java script and Java . Your "language" could be LVVM Intermediate representation or CIL providing C like performance and support for multiple languages and much greater reliability and speed.

A language based OS is not more layers it can be far simpler low level has not always been the way eg Burrows system which used Algol.

Agree the Java / Java script based ones add more layers at great cost but the designers do realise one thing in 10 years security and reliability targets for an OS will be far higher than today.

[Benk]

The problem with web apps is that Html, Css, and especially Javascript are terribly inefficient for doing that type of thing. I am a million, trillion times more productive using Silverlight than I am using HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript. RIA is simply a breeze when you don't sacrifice performance for the sake of ubiquity.

Agree.

HTML and AJAX are the greatest abominations computer scientist have unleashed on the world

In one foul swoop we created a distributed system which takes 10* longer to develop for the same result, its inconsistant ( grr firefox group border & legends) , unreliable , i still loose forms on browser hangs or post back issues ggrr , is inefficient and its complex. Would you design a nTier app which uses HTML & XML as the transport & embeds XML , Javascript , DHTML and CSS in the transport for the client to decypher and another lannguage on the server Java , VB , C# , PHP mixed with html etc ...

RIA are a step in the right direction.

[Owen]

Javascript, as a LISP in C's clothing, is a beautiful langauge. There is nothing to hate about it.

There are of course things to hate about browser based Javascript. This is why you use jQuery; it takes away the hassle.

As for Silverlight: Its a nasty patented nonstandard mess, encumbered with the horrid programming language of C#. If you're developing a rich internet application, please either stick to what the browser provides (It works, it intergrates), or use Flash, which is a freely available standard with no implementation restrictions (Again unlike Silverlight).

To add to this Flash has multiple implementations (Adobe's, obviously, and Scaleform, which is very, very good, plus the getting-there gnash and swfdec). For Silverlight, there is no implementation for which sizable portions are not Microsoft controlled binary blobs under highly restrictive licenses.

[Nathan]

Javascript, as a LISP in C's clothing, is a beautiful langauge. There is nothing to hate about it.

Yeah, it's a so beautiful language, that when I was learning it, I've developed many things on it because I like it's style ans then I used it as a normal application development language.

[inx]

Cloud computing represents a new business paradigm too

I completely agree with this statement, but not in the context that follows.

Companies are contemplating outsourcing their entire IT infrastructure to "cloud OSes" managed by third parties (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, SalesForce.com) because of the potential cost savings. Whether this is a good idea or not remains to be seen, but it's unlike anything that's happened before in this industry.

How is this unlike mainframes managed by outside firms dialing in for a shell? The only thing the owners or their employees, at many companies, knew how to do was log in from a terminal and run their reports.

On the technical side, there is also a big difference: Scale. A mainframe was just one machine with probably tens of users (maybe hundreds). Client/server ala 10-15 years ago would involve maybe hundreds of machines and thousands of users. Cloud computing involves tens of thousands of machines and millions of users.

I agree here, but I did say the paradigm had evolved. Whether it's a couple delivery vans or a fleet of semis pulling triple trailers, we still call them automobiles. Also, it was not always one machine, and one of those machines always had the hardware of 8-64 machines. Mainframes are not multiprocessor, they are multiple full systems from the point of view of the circuitry, with a high-speed local interconnect bus (network) along with, usually, a global supervisory system that can be accessed via serial terminal (or, in slightly more modern systems, telnet/cterm).

With tens of thousands of machines, hardware failures become very common. ... The datacenters now have to manage themselves -- automatically taking servers out of rotation, bringing up spares, deploying the right code to them, handle rolling upgrades, etc. All this magic that everyone here seems to take for granted is what goes into a "Cloud OS".

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMScluster under "Later Developments"
The wikipedia page for IBM's ESA/390(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ESA/390) notes that Parallel Sysplex (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Parallel_Sysplex) was added in 1994, which allows for the "Coupling Facility" with "Structure Duplexing"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupling_F ... _Duplexing), which amounts to networked failover between System/390 mainframes. Relatively new, but not Cloud new.
Oh, and can't leave out 1975: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers

All of these are smaller scale, but again, I'm talking about repeating patterns in evolution here.

[Thomas]

Hi,

How is this unlike mainframes managed by outside firms dialing in for a shell? The only thing the owners or their employees, at many companies, knew how to do was log in from a terminal and run their reports.

I am not an authority or expert on Azure.But that's not how it works.The end users do not even see that,for them its just like any other web app.But developer of the applications need to be aware of it,basically all the deployment and related things happen on the cloud, the developer can say I need X Servers for this App and forget about the rest.

However you are correct in saying that it is not something completely novel .

--Thomas

[quok]

Oh, and can't leave out 1975: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers

A bit off-topic, but if anyone ever has a chance to work on a Tandem, you should jump at it. I guarantee you'll be completely lost and unable to do anything for a few days. It is completely different to almost anything else you could possibly put your hands on. I find it's actually a lot of fun. We use a bunch of Tandem/Nonstop machines at work. I haven't worked with them much in the last few years (preferring to stick with linux clusters as much as I can), but I do greatly prefer the old Tandem stuff to the other esoteric environment I work with every day: OpenVMS.

[Benk]

Javascript, as a LISP in C's clothing, is a beautiful langauge. There is nothing to hate about it.

There are of course things to hate about browser based Javascript. This is why you use jQuery; it takes away the hassle.

As for Silverlight: Its a nasty patented nonstandard mess, encumbered with the horrid programming language of C#. If you're developing a rich internet application, please either stick to what the browser provides (It works, it intergrates), or use Flash, which is a freely available standard with no implementation restrictions (Again unlike Silverlight).

To add to this Flash has multiple implementations (Adobe's, obviously, and Scaleform, which is very, very good, plus the getting-there gnash and swfdec). For Silverlight, there is no implementation for which sizable portions are not Microsoft controlled binary blobs under highly restrictive licenses.

Its not the parts eg HTML is decent , but the combination that is an abomination. re Javascript no strong typing = scripting language at best.