On 04/09/2007, at 09:29, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
Map applications are an excellent example for this topic. First, they
may not have existed in the '80, but they certainly did exist in the
early '90s. Only then you couldn't do them without a serious client,
way over the capabilities of the PCs of the day. You needed a unix
workstation in order to present a photographic backdrop, and have
good capabilities for zoom and pan. Even screen resolution is PCs and
macintoshes of the day weren't good enough.
I think you are far off on that one. While most of it was developed in
the late 1970's, NASA was mapping things in the mid 1960's.
Computerized
weather maps were around since the 1950's.
What I meant was that in the early '90s you could get all these
algorithms in shrink-wrapped on-the-shelf software packages. Of
course, like Oracle, not every Joe could afford the software, nor the
hardware it required.
The trick, IMHO is not to do something new, but to come up with a new
way of doing old things.
My point wasn't that if something existed in the old days, it's not
worth doing any more. My point was that the technology is nothing
new, and has really nothing to do with web development. Web
development is used merely to present the technology. Even so, the
web is not a good enough platform for this kind of application, and
it's no wonder google creates an old-fashioned front end for it.
What I was trying to get across is that although I find writing yet-
another-SQL-query mind-numbingly boring, it doesn't mean that RDBMS
technology is boring. If I worked in the development of the database
itself, implementing a novel algorithm for indexing or fail-proofing
or whatever, it would be much more interesting. In the same vein -
writing in Javascript is boring, but implementing Javascript in a
browser is interesting.
Of course that's my personal taste.
Herouth
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