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

[Jason Birch]

I hope what I said earlier wasn't taken as a flame; I don't want to
limit discussion by taking a particularly strong stance one way or the
other.

I have a particular aversion to plugins in general after years of
supporting the 6.5 plugins on public computers (in uncontrolled
environments, novice users, support-by-voice) with only about a 75%
resolution rate. Java has given me fewer headaches than activex, but
there have still been some. But, as you say, this was on old-tech
Java. I don't have a lot of experience supporting flash, so maybe its
the same story.  All of this just by way of explaining my reaction :)

I agree that as long as we continue to support ie6 on our existing
clients, that it doesn't make sense to do so on new ones.

I have often thought that our Java support (app and installer) is
sub-optimal, and I'm sure that java devs would appreciate being thrown
a bone :)

Jason

On 2009-12-26, carlj <carl at jokl.co.uk> wrote:
>
> 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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> http://n2.nabble.com/Future-Development-Options-for-Web-Server-Extensions-and-new-High-Performance-Viewer-tp4208470p4218428.html
> Sent from the MapGuide Internals mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
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