[Tfug] Browser based UI's

[Tom Rini]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 07:01:24PM -0700, Bexley Hall wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> >   have you tried GWT?
>  
> But that's part of the issue.  What's the point of a browser
> based interface if you have to rewrite all your applications in 
> Java?  I.e., to me, the beauty of a browser interface would
> be that it could represent a "dumb client" and leave all the
> smarts server side.  If you're going to deliver the application
> to the client (instead of just the *interface*), then why not just
> build a VM that runs on bare iron and code directly in that
> (and skip talking to http://localhost).

Well, there are some nice things about having something inbetween the
application and the bare iron.  But part of the answer as to how a
mostly browser machine would work is that with some commodity parts
(x86) Java or C# or whatever is fast enough, and with other parts (some
ARM cores) there is HW assist for VMs, along with some tricks to speed
things up (Android for example spawns apps by forking a mostly
initialized VM, to save some cycles).  Oh, and of course you can have
the interpreter be tuned for the CPU and if things are design well,
it'll end up pretty fast.  And the porting effort isn't put on the
application developer, but the system developers.

But from the other point of view, the beauty of Java is that it's going
to work for everyone.  And having a browser that meets some set of
standards might fix the J2ME issue of a consistent but not elegant UI.

-- 
Tom Rini