Re: Re: Need help understanding desktop/handheld relationship

There are a few modern implementations of javascript that do not rely on an
HTML DOM and are not designed for use in browsers. These implementations,
for the most part, are designed for use as independent languages. Some are
even compiled. I think the most noteworthy is Rhino (
http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/), which is compiled to the JVM.

I'm suspending judgement. Maybe I'm just not very good at it, but in the
last few years I've found that mobile device companies generally defy
speculation. It might also have to do with increasing design complexity and
greater market penetration for mobile devices in general (which means a much
wider range of potential consumers, requirements and expectations). You can
never know exactly on what Palm or Apple or Google or Microsoft based their
decisions.

shovavnik

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 9:59 AM, Ken Latham <[email protected]>wrote:

>   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] <shadow-discuss%40yahoogroups.com>,
> "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
> >
>
>  
>


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