Squeak Morphic in the Browser
Diego Gómez Deck is experimenting with Seaside and Comet to display Squeak Morphic graphics in a web browser. From his Seaside mailing list announcement:
Categories: seaside, ajax
I implemented a "Fake" canvas on Squeak side (I mean an Squeak-canvas) that generated JavaScript to push (using Comet) to browsers. The speed is not so bad, and we still have room for more optimizations (reduce the size of the generated JS, compress the socket usint GZip-http, etc).
Categories: seaside, ajax
posted by Chris Double at 10:16 PM
2 Comments:
chris, interesting notes on transforming squeak to js (if i understand your post correctly). what are your thoughts on language independence in browser clients? it has been my opinion for some time that ultimately a vm-like environment must exist that allows client-side coders to pick their (compliant, feature and security wise) language. while js is adequate and js2 looks promising, i can't believe that the new "stack" will be a one-language world. in some future tense i would love to see firefox with a (then mature) parrot runtime that accepts parrot files (pil) generated by js, ruby, perl, python whatever, with the runtime enforcing security and a requirement of sourcecode being available on a mouse-click (md5 etc to ensure a match between pil code and source). what are your thoughts?
It does look like using other language in the web browser is getting more interest. Even things like Rails are hiding the Javascript generation behind Ruby code.
Brendan Eich spoke at the Ajax Experience conference and one of the questions was would a kind of VM be used for the browser client and he was quite sure that Javascript was likely to be the only option for some time.
Have you seen Morifk? It apparently compiles a number of languages (C#, Java, Basic and Pascal) to Javascript and the results are pretty amazing.
That said I think the declarative aspect of HTML along with using JS to manipulate the nodes is pretty effective and easy to use. I think going to a lower level language and raw coding of thegui may be a step backwards in terms of ease of development.
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