Rich Application Platforms

Well, there's been a bit of a kerfuffle about whether or not Silverlight (nee WPF/E) supports binding, widgets and XMLHttpRequest gubbins. And Adobe has open sourced Flex, as well as having had its Apollo platform out for a bit now. XULRunner is still going, being used for SongBird and Joost, and freshly the DVD version of Wikipedia, though whether or not Mozilla is promoting it well as a platform is under discussion.

Having done an awful lot of XULRunner programming in the last few months, there's still a lot to be done before its an easy to use platform. Quite a lot of undocumented interactions cause crashes - particularly race conditions between XBL bindings being attached and scripts in the body of the document being run, and any manipulation of the tree in script during an XBL constructor. But I don't have any idea how well Silverlight or Apollo handle such things, or even if they support anything as flexible as XBL. There needs to be an XULRunner 2.0 that is a lot more predictable in its behaviour, and less arcane in its invocations.

There's also a big question for the sort of system's I'm interested in - can a platform do something like the ClusterBall WikiPedia visualisation? XULRunner SVG grinds to a halt at a thousand or so arcs, and rotated font anti-aliasing is a bit off. Flash, using Haxe, can render ten thousand arcs, but getting text to rotate is a hassle - it requires embedded fonts, and that means more tools, you can't just set the rotation property. There's quite a lot of weirdness in Flash, half of it is object view graph based, the rest procedural, not everything works and it doesn't play nicely with the browser, for example capturing keyboard input and not being part of selections. As far as I know, there isn't an open high-quality 2D graphics library other than anti-grain 2.4 which will scale and isn't, well, a bit weird. But anti-grain has moved to GPL, and isn't hardware accelerated at 2.4, so what will become of it I don't know. I'd really like a good, object oriented language, with a mix of dynamic and static typing, support for mesh tuple spaces, event queues, first class functions and relations, orthogonal persistence, which runs fast enough, and generates portable, high quality visualisations and information displays. None of the options are quite there yet, but XULRunner's JavaScript and SVG seem to be the most sane.


Pete

A new word.

Communicy - a community that exists only inside a communication medium.

To replace the phrase "virtual community" since ofter communicies are more real than the ones on the streets these days.


TME

Art, state of, one year on from last year (the).

Previous frustrations with XMLHttpRequest, and more recently finding DeltaV didn't appear to be supported even in Firefox at work may be changed if a bit of sensible flexibility gets the W3C spec to conform to the HTTP rfc's extension-method = token rather than a vendor specific white-list.

I'd still really like a browser based, version controlled, graph drawing tool for modelling and knowledge capture, but with the WhatWG's canvas and support for SVG in Firefox stable enough that I'm writing production code based on it, and the real possibility of single page applications such as this wiki using Amazon Simple Storage Solution, I'm thinking of retiring the Java based, serverside image code of my LapisBlue, which I never got round to connecting to a versioned store anyway.

So I'm thinking of retiring LapisBlue, since I'm paying monthly for a full featured server solution that's not getting any use, whereas I can pay for a tiny amount of data storage and get the clients to do the rendering work now. Though proper version control would be nice, saving deltas or labelled versions to S3 should also be possible, more fun that configuring a tomcat installation that pulls in a thousand or so libraries, and not reliant on extension methods as subversion's DeltaV implementation is. What you lose is a queryable database, but I'm thinking of using it for a pattern wiki rather than anything else.

In other news, I got rather exited over the weekend thinking about using SSE for a faster 'byte' code interpreter, and resurrecting kin - my toy language for graph matching based code generators to generate simulation models defined generically on traits, which I'd partly implemented on the JVM - as a scripting language plugin for the gecko platform. If you can SIMD the graph matching, and maybe also either SIMD the bytecode scripting, or (since kin uses pure visitor functions a lot) use SIMD optimised blocks with scripting, you may get close to Java performance without having to track Sun's generics cruft.

It's still easier for me to write Java than C++, especially when you need to use libraries - each library having its own code conventions and memory management model - or Lisp for that matter (since I've done far more Java than Lisp in anger), but for many things JavaScript's good enough. The only things I've found this year that I've written in Java have been something to test an algorithm for work, which could have been written in anything really, and an annealing based graph layout, which ran too slow in JS to be useable. But annealing graphs is exactly what kin would be suited to, and be designed to parallelise it, so it may be that the Java world gets even smaller for me.

I'm not sure how useful web-based simulation tools would be, and suspect a good enough interpreter + a really, really good code generator would be a better match to a lot of the problems I like thinking about than trying to do anything like Sun's Hotspot, brilliant though it is.

Third point of this summary - I'm also excited about building distributed clusters of collaborating applications and services on top of xmpp. It's something I've been pushing at work, and I've got enough of the infrastructure there that the rest of my team are starting to play with it, building models and connecting them to XUL UI's with xmpp pub-sub. I've got till mid June to build it out to a full distributed system with service discovery, which means a mix of quite easy xml binding and doing some fairly hard concurrency work to get the simulators' execution model and the pubsub code working well without excessive threads or critical sections.

Oh, and I'm going to XTech2006 next month. It's nice to be working for somewhere that's not too stingy to send it's people away again.


TME