But fighting the web is like holding back the ocean; it will route around you or it will wear you down, but will never go away, and it will never tire or give up. Yet in spite of the futility of fighting the web, Silverlight is being positioned in opposition to the web, not in support of it

This is one of a few great quotes from DeWitt Clinton’s post On Fighting the Web itself. DeWitt is a colleague at Google, one that I have shared offices with, and great conversations. He has very strong ethics, but at the same time is very practical. But, back to his writing.

This is not a post saying “the Open Web rules and the proprietary Web is evil”. If you actually read this carefully you see a very interesting argument that covers:

We can’t be blind:

The short answer is that the technology behind Silverlight, and most certainly the company creating it, has the potential of changing how the web itself works.

The Web has strengths, but man it is tough to work with:

If you’re a web developer then you’ve felt the acute pain involved in writing applications inside the browser. Even armed with the most state-of-the-art toolkits, such as jQuery, Dojo, etc., you’re still limited to the available runtime of HTML, CSS, and JS, and worse, the absolute morass of cross-browser incompatibilities and restricted access to native client-side capabilities. I remain in awe of what people have accomplished in this environment, but I’m sad that this is all we’ve been able to accomplish so far.

Man, if the client is involved… evolution is slooooow:

The web revs slowly. Very, very slowly. In 10 years we’ve seen virtually no meaningful advances in the the ubiquitous web client; just a painful slog forward as web developers learn to eek out just a little more functionality in a constrained environment. Progress is slow because revving the ubiquitous client requires the coordination of multiple parties, not all of whom have shown consistent interest in working together to move the web forward.

There is some hope for an Open Web-style speedup:

More recently we’ve seen some earnest attempts at breaking that cycle. Rather than wait for the entire web to catch up, projects like Gears seek to rev the client from the inside out. It may take several years for standards like HTML5 to be widely deployed, but if developers can gain a toehold inside the client and start forcing the issue immediately then we’ll quickly see what works and what doesn’t, and be that much more informed about what to standardize and adopt as part of the long-term web platform.

The proprietary folks have a huge advantage, as they can just innovate and run without getting consensus:

But there’s another approach, an approach best exemplified today by the Flash runtime, whereby one doesn’t seek to improve the web from the inside, but rather replace it entirely. Sure, technologies like Flash take advantage of the web via http-based delivery mechanisms and in that they run inside the browser, and yes, they can use network connections like anything else, but these alternate runtimes fundamentally divorce themselves from the web ecosystem, and in doing so gain a significant advantage, but at a cost.

In spite of circumventing the web — no, because they circumvent the web — these new runtimes have the potential of offering a far better developer experience, and hence, a far better user experience, then the least-common-denominator of the standard widely-deployed ubiquitous browser runtimes of today.

And, thus, the proprietary stuff can be very good indeed:

Which leads us to Silverlight: Silverlight is positioned to take the fork-and-forget approach to the web pioneered by Flash and bring to it an unprecedented wealth of technology and corporate might. With a better underlying runtime and VM, better tool support, far superior multi-language capabilities, and more marketing muscle, Silverlight has all the potential to make rapid and noticeable inroads over the next several months, cleaving a large section clean out of the web.

And the scary thing? That this isn’t entirely a bad idea. The browser itself is anemic, the dependency on a single language is a handicap, the security models simultaneously constricting and flawed, the development environments underpowered, and frankly, the whole ecosystem is deserving of a major disruption. We’ve lived too long thinking that what we have today is good enough.

And will get better, fast:

Granted, these technologies won’t be perfect at first. On the contrary, they might be slow, cumbersome to deploy, buggy, and feature deprived. But right now that doesn’t matter. The strategy is all about getting a wedge in place, a bit of leverage that can be used to further pry open a vector for escaping the existing ecosystem. And over time, as the technology improves and adoption grows, so will the size of that tear in the fabric of the web.

But, there is a reason why the Web does so well:

But fighting the web is like holding back the ocean; it will route around you or it will wear you down, but will never go away, and it will never tire or give up. Yet in spite of the futility of fighting the web, Silverlight is being positioned in opposition to the web, not in support of it.

Why in opposition to the web? This stems from the principle that the web is axiomatically defined as an open system, where the underlying technologies are resistant to the centralization of control, where the protocols and formats are extensible and malleable, and where the power to effect change is shared and distributed. The DNA of the web is one of ceding control, and of learning to work with, rather than against, the collective wisdom and power a larger community.

Whereas a development monoculture, a centralization of control, and a tight grasp on the ability to change and adapt, all stand against these basic ideals, and give rise to the forces that, given enough time, will erode and eat away at any temporary advantage gained.

A violation of these principles does not necessarily make for a bad technology, but it does make it something other than the web.

And finally, and this is so key, the answer isn’t to try to destroy the innovation in Flash, Silverlight, and others. Instead, the biggest win will be for us to make technology from those worlds into the Web itself. If we can do that, I think it will be a win-win, and we will have a much better Web to show for it:

But the call to action here is not to go and try to fight the disruptive technology. On the contrary, the ideas are sound and the improvements are very much needed. No, the call is to discover ways in which these ideas can become a part of the web, rather than working to tear it apart.

I do not want to see ambitious attempts like these fail. Just the opposite — I want to see them succeed. But success on the web requires a different kind of DNA, the type of DNA that is difficult to adopt when one’s attention is focused on fighting the web itself.

What is XSTM?

XSTMis made of three projects. The Java implementation is called JSTMand is the base from which the other versions are derived. An adapted version made with Luciano, the author of GWM , is available for GWT . It allowsthis library to be used in a browser. NSTM is a .NET port based on IKVM.

All implementations are compatible with each other so object replication can take place e.g. between a Java server and a .NET Smart Client.

This JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook applications. Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline.

JSJaC is a jabber/XMPP client library written in JavaScript to ease implementation of web based jabber/XMPP clients. For communication with a jabber server it needs to support either HTTP Pollingor XMPP Over BOSH(formerly known as HTTP Binding). JSJaC has an object oriented design which should be quite easy to use. Communication is done by using the XML HTTP Request objectalso refered to as AJAX technology. Your browser must support this.

Using Caja, web apps can safely allow scripts in third party content.
The computer industry has only one significant success enabling documents to carry active content safely: scripts in web pages. Normal users regularly browse untrusted sites with Javascript turned on. Modulo browser bugs and phishing, they mostly remain safe. But even though web apps build on this success, they fail to provide its power. Web apps generally remove scripts from third party content, reducing content to passive data. Examples include webmail, groups, blogs, chat, docs and spreadsheets, wikis, and more.
Were scripts in an object-capability language, web apps could provide active content safely, simply, and flexibly. Surprisingly, this is possible within existing web standards. Caja represents our discovery that a subset of Javascript is an object-capability language

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Mapsand Gmaileasy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Javaprogramming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

A simple command-line tool to create the folders and helper files for a new JavaScript project/library. As a bonus, you can quickly create a website to promote your project.

When you start a new JavaScript library, how do you layout the source files, the tests, the distribution files? Do you have support scripts to generate distributions from source files? Run your JavaScript unit tests? Generators to create new unit test HTMLfiles?