Re: Need help understanding desktop/handheld relationship

Well, JS is inherently local otherwise they're called JSPs (Java
Server Pages) ;) ...  So, yes, I'm not arguing the locality of the
application and its speed.  It's that JS is "fast and loose" as a
language (its semantics), and generally not suited for larger
applications which can operate without server support for long periods.

Javascript is meant for interaction in a web page.  Yes, you can
engineer a whole lot more with it, but local web page interaction is
what it was *designed* to do.

IF the phone has a local server it uses when not connected, AND you
can program for *it*, I think I wouldn't worry too much about the
apparent limitation to JS ... but then, it wouldn't be a limitation
anymore, would it? :)

So when they say "HTML, CSS and JS", I take them at their word, and
presume that the server side is remote, and is always presumed to be so.

I'm worried that there is no room for more traditional applications
which do not *need* server access to work well, with the exception of
backup, perhaps.  There are many things for which I would *not* want
to depend on remote data stores to operate.

Even if they have some "caching" scheme, the operational
characteristics are still out of the programmer's hands.  Likely, if a
caching scheme were implemented, you would have to ensure that the
resources you needed were cached *before* going off-line ... I am not
always that forward looking ... I'd need a *very large* cache! ;)

Just deeply concerned, and need *more* information!

Ken  

--- In [email protected], "Michael Kizer" <mkizer@...> wrote:
>
> For an interesting insider look at developing apps for Palm's WebOS,
> check this out:
>
http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9685/interview-with-pandora-about-developing-for-webos/
> 
> Here's a tidbit --
> TC: Well, I think one of the important little nuances here to
> understand is that you might think from the name "webOS" and from the
> technologies used – HTML and CSS and Javascript – you might think that
> this is the whole thing, just kind of a fancy web browser, and that
> you're – y'know, any interaction you take is interacting with web
> content. That's really not how it works at all. What you really have,
> is that you have an environment where a developer can write a
> traditional application – so, an application that gets installed onto
> the phone with all its code and all of its user interface elements and
> that is actually local to the phone. There's also a database and file
> storage that allows you to take data from the internet connection and
> store it locally – so when you're browsing your contacts, for example,
> you're interacting with an application that's local to the phone, with
> interface elements that are local to the phone and with contacts that
> are actually sitting on the phone.
> 
> What makes it this "webOS" is that the programming models for your
> developer rather than being C or Java is really just HTML and CSS and
> Javascript. So you can take a developer who's been developing web
> applications and quickly get them productive in the webOS SDK,
> leveraging their familiarity with these web-based standards. And that
> decision is one of the reasons we were able to get, very very quickly,
> a version of Pandora up and running. We were able to take one of our
> star web developers – someone who has never touched the Palm webOS and
> not done mobile development before – and have that person be
> immediately productive because it's all based on systems that they're
> familiar with from web development.
> 
> -- 
> ~Michael Kizer
> http://MichaelKizer.com
>