I think you need to understand that it's a bit of a stretch that shoes
will work as a desktop platform on OS-X, Linux, and Windows well,
because currently, it doesn't it kind of sort of does... We are all
hopeful, and there is plenty of progress each and every day towards
that fantastic goal. There are many great places shoes could visit
after that, like, perhaps the iPhone, and Android devices, and perhaps
the web browser too. But until then, Shoes has plenty to be, plenty to
live up to, and frankly, we don't need a new browser plugin for
interactive widgets. We already have java (think jRuby + processing),
flash (javascript is a fantastic language on it's own, available in a
high speed bytecode compiled version in flash), and indeed also
Silverlight, which is able to run ruby applications as a widget on
macs and pc's via .NET, and is gaining support from open source
platforms too.
What the web really needs now, are quality web browsers with enough
power to make fantastic javascript applications. Nobody wants to
install one more plugin. They're a pain in the butt, and as google
points out in their own comic, compromise google's ability to create a
secure browser. Google is one of many pushing the forward now,
especially with Chrome's V8 javascript engine, which I expect is even
faster than ruby 1.9 would be, given it compiles javascript in to raw
x86 machine code that runs straight on your cpu. There is no VM... the
javascript becomes executable binary.
So now we have compiled code execution speeds, brilliant css support,
canvas, <audio> and <video> (at least in webkit, anyone tried these in
Chrome yet?), and with John Resig's Processing.js, we have a good
drawing api as well, with many more surely to follow. What exactly
about embedded shoes would one up any of those things I wonder.
How about this though, maybe this is better? Who wants to implement a
java applet that builds in jRuby and a fake shoes interface that
replicates shoes functionality via java's drawing api's, which thanks
to Processing, we now are all quite aware, do not suck much. Could be
nifty, and doesn't require users to install an obscure plugin with an
even stranger name.
On 03/09/2008, at 9:59 PM, Leslie Wu wrote:
By now, some of you may have seen Google's new browser announcement,
aka "Chrome" (http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/).
I think what's exciting about this development is that there will
finally be a modern, open source WebKit-based multi-platform browser
engine that supports a plugin architecture and holds the promise of
easier (?) hackability.
Last year, I experimented with a whole bunch of different ways to
better integrate the browser-as-app-engine and desktop (http://jinsync.com/
), and looking now I see a blog post in May 2007 where I talked
about the "future of the web (app)" -- http://jinsync.com/?q=node/14
-- and alas it took a while but Gears came out, and a year+ later, a
beta version of Chrome is out. (Interesting also that Chrome
generally addresses the notions I mentioned in March 2007 -- http://jinsync.com/?q=node/12)
And while a RESTfully Organic FF didn't quite happen (http://lwu.vox.com/library/post/on-the-future-of-the-fox.html
), I'm at least hopeful that Shoes and perhaps HacketyHack will find
their way mayhap into Chrome. What do you folks think of that -- who
wants to implement Shoes as a Chrome plugin so that somedaysoon HH
will be but a button clicks (3x) away?
I've been brainstorming interesting Chrome <-> Shoes interactions,
and I generally like the idea of being able to embed Shoes apps into
webpages, whether statically or dynamically, such that Shoes apps
can hit back and troll the DOM jQuery/Hpricot style and Chrome can
send events to Shoes. Maybe what I'm really saying is, why not Shoes
where today we find Flash? While I'm not proposing that Shoes take
over (yet) the SWF world, Shoes does have nice native platform
integration in terms of Ruby / Ruby gems and of course the ability
to touch local resources through Ruby and/or C-implemented libraries
(Hpricot / Mongrel).
But if that's off in the horizon, have any folks experimented with
embedded Shoes in Mongrel or versa vice? I'd like to be able to send
data RESTfully from my browser to Shoes apps (to do super colorful
graphics and the like)...
~L
