[mapguide-internals] Future Development Options for Web Server Extensions and new High Performance Viewer

[carlj]

There must be some people in the world who think Plug-ins are a good idea or
why are Flash, JavaFX and Silverlight busily trying to compete with each
other.

I can see the trend towards everything running in the browser using
JavaScript. I think it is a shame because if it had been known JavaScript
would be used to try and do these kinds of things then I think the language
would have been designed differently. It was only supposed to be a simple
glue language. JavaScript 2 which was supposed to beef up the language a bit
seems now to have been derailed. Each browser seems to have a slightly
different flavour of JavaScript. Then different versions of the same browser
have different capabilities. 

I wonder if it is so wrong of me that I like the fact that the plug-in
technology at least provides a consistent development experience rather than
all the feature probing and conditional code I seem to get caught into when
it comes to JavaScript. No real ability to import and the JavaScript source
code all has to get send over the wire rather than some more compact
bytecode format. It is impressive that the new JavaScript engines
performance is now close to what was previously only possible with plug-in
technology. However it remains to be seen if IE decides to produce a high
performance JavaScript engine. 

One thought I haven't suggested as it may get me flamed but I have
considered regarding the Web Server Extensions that there is a real buzz
right now about running different (particularly web) languages on top of the
Java or .Net virtual machine/runtime. Perhaps with the Web Server Extensions
exposed to Java and .Net those platforms themselves provide the capabilities
to develop with a diverse range of web languages. There is Jython and JRuby
on the Java side and Iron Python and Iron Ruby on the .Net side to name a
couple. Java has a full implementation of PHP available which runs on it and
I seem to have found something similar on the .Net side. This approach would
support far more languages than the 3 officially supported ones at the
moment. Perhaps it is a possibility in the long term. The PHP people may not
be happy with this idea though. LAMP servers are after all very popular on
the internet.
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