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Fwd: 10 reasons the browser is becoming the universal OS ( - Software )

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Owen Densmore

Fwd: 10 reasons the browser is becoming the universal OS ( - Software )

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Slightly sophomoric, but interesting:

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=38FBC962-C6BF-964F-590BACFE526B0A98

The reasons:

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 1: The rise of vast, rich Web applications

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 2: Easy extensibility via plug-ins

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 3: Its open source foundation

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 4: Metaprogramming

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 5: Multiplatform simplicity and mutability

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 6: A clean abstraction layer

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 7: Better sharing models for libraries

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 8: Fertile, competitive marketplace

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 9: SVG, canvas, vector graphics, great user interfaces

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 10: Node.js

The article expands. JSEverywhere has been in our minds for quite some time, but this is yet another articulation.

-- Owen

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Steve Smith

Re: [WedTech] Fwd: 10 reasons the browser is becoming the universal OS ( - Software )

Owen -

I generally agree with the point you are making but always feel compelled to make the counter point that modern browsers are replacing the Window/Desktop manager more than the OS. Yes, there is a sophisticated JS interpreter in them, but that is as deep as it really goes IMO.

With your background, you obviously appreciate that the current state of browsers is roughly what I think was conceived of when Sun invented the Network Extensible Window System (NEWS), only with JavaScript instead of PostScript. I think NEWS would have been a better (technically) solution if it had been allowed to mature over another 20 years (as browsers have).

That said, I think it has *finally* come of age... I was an early adopter/developer in the WWW space and saw the potential but was frustrated by the ragged pace of such popular movements and oddly competitive markets (remember when McNeally publicly buried the hatchet with Gates at JavaOne II I think... after deliberately crashing their servers publicly at JavaOne I ?).

"the browser" is a very sophisticated but still crufty IMO place to live.

Following Winston Churchill's great quote: "the browser is the worst OS/Window/Desktop system around, except for all of the others".

- Steve

Slightly sophomoric, but interesting:

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=38FBC962-C6BF-964F-590BACFE526B0A98

The reasons:

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 1: The rise of vast, rich Web applications

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 2: Easy extensibility via plug-ins

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 3: Its open source foundation

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 4: Metaprogramming

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 5: Multiplatform simplicity and mutability

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 6: A clean abstraction layer

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 7: Better sharing models for libraries

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 8: Fertile, competitive marketplace

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 9: SVG, canvas, vector graphics, great user interfaces

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 10: Node.js

The article expands. JSEverywhere has been in our minds for quite some time, but this is yet another articulation.

-- Owen
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Owen Densmore

Re: [WedTech] Fwd: 10 reasons the browser is becoming the universal OS ( - Software )

Administrator

Agreed. Just messy enough to survive. And evolve.

All the forever machines have been a surprise.

Who'da thought 30 computer scientists could have meet for a month at NSF, come up with the internet protocol and still be here after *none* of the initial hardware atoms still participate, and *none* of the original code is in place.

Who'da thought Brendan Eich would present Scheme as the language for the Netscape internals, what we now call the DOM. And be rejected .. go fetch another rock. And in less than a week, he gives Scheme a pretty face .. i.e. "looks like a real language". The rest is history.

Messy lives. Good thing, considering my office!

-- Owen

On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 9:43 PM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Owen -

I generally agree with the point you are making but always feel compelled to make the counter point that modern browsers are replacing the Window/Desktop manager more than the OS. Yes, there is a sophisticated JS interpreter in them, but that is as deep as it really goes IMO.

With your background, you obviously appreciate that the current state of browsers is roughly what I think was conceived of when Sun invented the Network Extensible Window System (NEWS), only with JavaScript instead of PostScript. I think NEWS would have been a better (technically) solution if it had been allowed to mature over another 20 years (as browsers have).

That said, I think it has *finally* come of age... I was an early adopter/developer in the WWW space and saw the potential but was frustrated by the ragged pace of such popular movements and oddly competitive markets (remember when McNeally publicly buried the hatchet with Gates at JavaOne II I think... after deliberately crashing their servers publicly at JavaOne I ?).

"the browser" is a very sophisticated but still crufty IMO place to live.

Following Winston Churchill's great quote: "the browser is the worst OS/Window/Desktop system around, except for all of the others".

- Steve
Slightly sophomoric, but interesting:

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=38FBC962-C6BF-964F-590BACFE526B0A98

The reasons:

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 1: The rise of vast, rich Web applications

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 2: Easy extensibility via plug-ins

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 3: Its open source foundation

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 4: Metaprogramming

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 5: Multiplatform simplicity and mutability

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 6: A clean abstraction layer

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 7: Better sharing models for libraries

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 8: Fertile, competitive marketplace

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 9: SVG, canvas, vector graphics, great user interfaces

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 10: Node.js

The article expands. JSEverywhere has been in our minds for quite some time, but this is yet another articulation.

-- Owen
_______________________________________________
Wedtech mailing list
[hidden email]
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/wedtech_redfish.com
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: [WedTech] Fwd: 10 reasons the browser is becoming the universal OS ( - Software )

On 11/19/13, 10:27 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:
> Who'da thought Brendan Eich would present Scheme as the language for
> the Netscape internals, what we now call the DOM. And be rejected ..
> go fetch another rock. And in less than a week, he gives Scheme a
> pretty face .. i.e. "looks like a real language". The rest is history.
Imagine what could have been accomplished if they would have gone with
Scheme? No XML, not apologists with JSON. Speaking of Scheme, there
was a nice document layout system called DSSSL that thrived for a while
in the late 90's. Of course, anything that versatile needs to be
stopped, so we got XSL instead. I tried, too hard, to use XSLT as a
functional browser-based programming language for years, but let's face
it, it's got the XML disease. When you think you've got it good with
JavaScript, well, is there any hope at all?

Marcus

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Stephen Guerin

Re: [WedTech] Fwd: 10 reasons the browser is becoming the universal OS ( - Software )

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

A quick look into NeWS lore: Gosling and Rosenthal write this in their acknowledgments in their NeWS book:

http://books.google.com/books?id=xHSoK66z34YC

Man, as I look at NeWS and what we're trying to build in AgentScript / Firebase / Acequia, you can practically replace the word "NeWS" in Owen's descriptions and replace it with Javascript Everywhere. It's a 27-year-old wine wrapped in the new bottle of the browser :-)

Here's an abstract from Owen's '86 paper (http://xpost.googlecode.com/files/monterey86.pdf‎)

Object Oriented Programming in NeWS

The NeWS† window system provides the primitives needed to create window managers and user-interface toolkits, but does not, itself, supply either. This is done to achieve a layering strategy for building several higher level systems that can share NeWS as their low level window system. None of the traditional ‘‘tool kit’’ solutions currently span the diverse set of clients NeWS needed to serve; they simply lack sufficient flexibility. We are exploring an object oriented approach which uses a flexible inheritance scheme. This paper presents our initial attempt at introducing a Smalltalk style class mechanism to PostScript‡, and our first use of it.

Introduction to NeWS

NeWS is a server-based window system which replaces the usual network protocols for express- ing window and graphics primitives by an interpreted programming language. The language consists of almost all of Adobe System’s PostScript [5], with some extensions.

The extensions to PostScript include:

􏰀 Primitives for managing client TCP/IP style connections.
􏰀 Primitives for light-weight processes.
􏰀 Multiple drawing surfaces called ‘‘canvases’’.
􏰀 An event mechanism for handling user input and inter-process communication.
􏰀 Use of garbage collection.

--- -. . ..-. .. ... .... - .-- --- ..-. .. ... ....

[hidden email]

1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505

office: (505) 995-0206 tollfree: (888) 414-3855

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On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 9:43 PM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Owen -

I generally agree with the point you are making but always feel compelled to make the counter point that modern browsers are replacing the Window/Desktop manager more than the OS. Yes, there is a sophisticated JS interpreter in them, but that is as deep as it really goes IMO.

With your background, you obviously appreciate that the current state of browsers is roughly what I think was conceived of when Sun invented the Network Extensible Window System (NEWS), only with JavaScript instead of PostScript. I think NEWS would have been a better (technically) solution if it had been allowed to mature over another 20 years (as browsers have).

That said, I think it has *finally* come of age... I was an early adopter/developer in the WWW space and saw the potential but was frustrated by the ragged pace of such popular movements and oddly competitive markets (remember when McNeally publicly buried the hatchet with Gates at JavaOne II I think... after deliberately crashing their servers publicly at JavaOne I ?).

"the browser" is a very sophisticated but still crufty IMO place to live.

Following Winston Churchill's great quote: "the browser is the worst OS/Window/Desktop system around, except for all of the others".

- Steve
Slightly sophomoric, but interesting:

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=38FBC962-C6BF-964F-590BACFE526B0A98

The reasons:

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 1: The rise of vast, rich Web applications

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 2: Easy extensibility via plug-ins

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 3: Its open source foundation

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 4: Metaprogramming

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 5: Multiplatform simplicity and mutability

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 6: A clean abstraction layer

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 7: Better sharing models for libraries

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 8: Fertile, competitive marketplace

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 9: SVG, canvas, vector graphics, great user interfaces

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 10: Node.js

The article expands. JSEverywhere has been in our minds for quite some time, but this is yet another articulation.

-- Owen
_______________________________________________
Wedtech mailing list
[hidden email]
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/wedtech_redfish.com
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: [WedTech] Fwd: 10 reasons the browser is becoming the universal OS ( - Software )

There was really no app logic (or very little) written in PostScript for NeXTstep applications, that was all Objective C. It would have been interesting to have it all be PostScript. Did NeWS do that?

On 11/19/2013 11:02 PM, Stephen Guerin wrote:

A quick look into NeWS lore: Gosling and Rosenthal write this in their acknowledgments in their NeWS book:
http://books.google.com/books?id=xHSoK66z34YC

Man, as I look at NeWS and what we're trying to build in AgentScript / Firebase / Acequia, you can practically replace the word "NeWS" in Owen's descriptions and replace it with Javascript Everywhere. It's a 27-year-old wine wrapped in the new bottle of the browser :-)

Here's an abstract from Owen's '86 paper (http://xpost.googlecode.com/files/monterey86.pdf‎)

Object Oriented Programming in NeWS

The NeWS† window system provides the primitives needed to create window managers and user-interface toolkits, but does not, itself, supply either. This is done to achieve a layering strategy for building several higher level systems that can share NeWS as their low level window system. None of the traditional ‘‘tool kit’’ solutions currently span the diverse set of clients NeWS needed to serve; they simply lack sufficient flexibility. We are exploring an object oriented approach which uses a flexible inheritance scheme. This paper presents our initial attempt at introducing a Smalltalk style class mechanism to PostScript‡, and our first use of it.

Introduction to NeWS

NeWS is a server-based window system which replaces the usual network protocols for express- ing window and graphics primitives by an interpreted programming language. The language consists of almost all of Adobe System’s PostScript [5], with some extensions.

The extensions to PostScript include:

� Primitives for managing client TCP/IP style connections.
� Primitives for light-weight processes.
� Multiple drawing surfaces called ‘‘canvases’’.
� An event mechanism for handling user input and inter-process communication.
� Use of garbage collection.
--- -. .   ..-. .. ... ....   - .-- ---   ..-. .. ... ....
[hidden email]

1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505

office: (505) 995-0206 tollfree: (888) 414-3855

mobile: (505) 577-5828 fax: (505) 819-5952

tw: @redfishgroup skype: redfishgroup gvoice: (505) 216-6226

redfish.com |  simtable.com
On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 9:43 PM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
Owen -

I generally agree with the point you are making but always feel compelled to make the counter point that modern browsers are replacing the Window/Desktop manager more than the OS. Yes, there is a sophisticated JS interpreter in them, but that is as deep as it really goes IMO.

With your background, you obviously appreciate that the current state of browsers is roughly what I think was conceived of when Sun invented the Network Extensible Window System (NEWS), only with JavaScript instead of PostScript. I think NEWS would have been a better (technically) solution if it had been allowed to mature over another 20 years (as browsers have).

That said, I think it has *finally* come of age... I was an early adopter/developer in the WWW space and saw the potential but was frustrated by the ragged pace of such popular movements and oddly competitive markets (remember when McNeally publicly buried the hatchet with Gates at JavaOne II I think... after deliberately crashing their servers publicly at JavaOne I ?).

"the browser" is a very sophisticated but still crufty IMO place to live.

Following Winston Churchill's great quote: "the browser is the worst OS/Window/Desktop system around, except for all of the others".

- Steve
Slightly sophomoric, but interesting:

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=38FBC962-C6BF-964F-590BACFE526B0A98

The reasons:

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 1: The rise of vast, rich Web applications

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 2: Easy extensibility via plug-ins

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 3: Its open source foundation

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 4: Metaprogramming

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 5: Multiplatform simplicity and mutability

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 6: A clean abstraction layer

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 7: Better sharing models for libraries

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 8: Fertile, competitive marketplace

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 9: SVG, canvas, vector graphics, great user interfaces

Browser as ultimate OS reason No. 10: Node.js

The article expands. JSEverywhere has been in our minds for quite some time, but this is yet another articulation.

-- Owen
_______________________________________________
Wedtech mailing list
[hidden email]
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/wedtech_redfish.com
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com