Let me start off by saying that I'm a believer in middleweight applications; that is to say, applications that you don't have to install, are net-accessible, and provide functionality beyond the standard HTML widgets. Some platform contenders for this are Flash, SVG, and maybe Java web-start applications.

So far Flash has my bet, since they have the tightest story with respect to delivery. My experience with its cross-platformness has been pretty good, but I do have some reservations regarding performance with Flash as an application platform; it just feels sluggish, kinda like early java applets used to.

On the other hand, I've seen some really amazing stuff done with DHTML. In fact, most of the serious flash applications (i.e., the ones that do things that might be considered useful) end up seeming to me like they could have been done with DHTML. Now, you and I both know that Flash is capable of a lot more, AND that Flash is more likely to work on different browsers and platforms. Certainly Flash is capable of giving the user a richer interactive experience. But WHAT exactly is that thing (or things) that makes RIAs the knock-down, drag-out winner?

We need some folks to lead the way in developing a new "language" of applications, sort of like how important filmmakers have developed a narrative language of film, showing how certain techniques give you compelling results... beyond the web app, and hopefully way beyond the sea-of-gray dialogs peppered with a mishmash of components like most apps designed with a visual GUI designer (VB, any number of Java IDEs, Delphi, etc.).

Who are some likely people to do this? Maybe Brandon Hall, or Jared Tarbell, or Yugo Nakamura, (hint-go look at some of the things these folks have done!) or somebody I've never heard of.

I *still* haven't seen the killer middleweight app, the one that will convince everyone that this is definitely the thing we should be throwing our efforts into, instead of yet another web application. Don't get me wrong... I think that web applications are one of the best things to happen to computers. But there are better interactions out there... I'm SURE of it!

Once the breakthroughs have been made, then we (hopefully this includes Macromedia) need to start educating all the developers in how to design in this new way, to take advantage of the possibilities enabled by this technology. And that may be the hardest part, because we all know that developing good software is damn hard.
posted on 12/19/2003 09:05:00 AM

Many web apps that I see and futz with are dynamically generated; this is to say that each time someone clicks a link on a site, the web application server will go read some form of data store (often a relational database) and compose the page on-the-fly, render it in HTML, and send it merrily back to the requester's browser.

Don't get me wrong... dynamic web pages are a very very cool idea; I remember back in the day when folks first started messing with cgi, I was blown away by the limitless possibilities of being able to deliver the services of software without everyone having to install it on their own computer. What makes the use of dynamic web pages problematic is that the act of assembling a web page on every access is that it sucks down CPU and I/O resources on the server, and when you're under load, things can get very, very s - l - o - w. And we all know how annoying that can be.

So what can be done about this? We do what we always do when we're looking for a performance optimization:

We cheat.

We take advantage of the fact that with most web applications, the data isn't really changing constantly. For example, with even the most frequently updated blog, updates only happen several times a day. So when thousands of folks hit your application, you're still building the page dynamically for each user, even when you've already built an identical page for someone else only milliseconds before.

You want a really fast web application? Get as close as you can to serving up purely static content as you can. Let your web server take the heat... it has been optimized to serve up lots of pages using the file system. There are two approaches that could be taken... the first is having an application on the same machine as your web server writing out to the file system, i.e., regenerating the necessary pages upon a publishing event. The other alternative is to run your publishing machinery elsewhere, have it generate your site, and then blow it out to your static site via ftp (a la blogger).

Why don't more folks do this? Well, it's certainly easier to just do everything dynamically. Determining what has to be generated, and the methods for doing this generation would take a little bit of extra work and a bit of thought. It would be really nice if someone came up with an open source mechanism for doing this sort of thing.
posted on 12/14/2003 12:51:00 AM

Photography has been in the forefront of my activities lately. Though I'm not a particularly accomplished photographer, I really like the act of capturing images. It's also a lot of fun just to go out and look at stuff. Also, doing photography has really made me sit up and pay more attention to light (and color and texture and composition and whatnot).

I've put up a photo-a-day site at http://figuresix.dyndns.org:8080/folio/picture.jsp so if you're in the mood to know what I've been playing at lately, go give it a visit.
posted on 12/13/2003 10:38:00 PM