Issues with my Web 4.0 design

So, I have been thinking some more about my design and been reading some interesting papers the nice people at UCI gave me when I visited the other day to seed my literature review. I realized, there is a huge issue which I have overlooked so far: delay and asynchronicity.

On a side note, it seems that neither links nor Luna concern themselves much with this particular problem, but it has been brought to the attention of one of the developers of Links after a talk he recently gave, cf. here.

Future of the web happening now!

As it turns out, I am not the only one to notice (obviously) the apparent complexity of writing large-scale applications for the web today. Moreover I am also not the only one trying to do something about it. There are at least 3 different projects that I got aware of recently.

1. The first is an eclipse project called Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) that was born out of RCP and uses the same model (OSGi etc.): http://eclipsesource.com/en/eclipse/eclipse-rap/. It can compile both a stand-alone desktop application as well as web-application that look similar from the same source. I think it looks promising and is a very good first step.
2. Both the second and the third take a completely different approach in that the idea is to write everything in a functional language. I learned about Luna a couple of days ago, when I got a link on twitter about it: http://asana.com/luna. It has a C-style syntax but allows you to write everything in a monolithic way and pretend you have full access to say, the DB in a template. It supports JS-escaping similar to asm{} blocks in C, as well as XML and CSS as top-level constructs in the language syntax. I have to say that it looks very cool, and almost too easy to write a web-application that way (look at the example on their page, to see what I mean).
3. The third is almost the same idea but from a research lab in the UK, started about 5 years ago, called links: http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/links/. I found that link in the comments on the luna blog The syntax is a little more functional but the underlying idea is the same, and has some of the same features, ie. XML top-level construct, monolithic single-sourcing etc. It is written on top of Caml.

Ailments of current web-development

Mornin’ class.

What do you think the dilemma – well actually it’s not only two-faced, so it would be more appropriate to call it an nlemma – of web-development of today is? Which of the following?

• Having to write at least three different languages which span two execution-cycles
• The strange security model on browsers that you have to program around (no client-side state)
• Keeping in mind the quirks of at least 5 major browsers
• Explicit separation of client and server
• Expressiveness of application state, i.e. navigation-history and bookmark-ability
• The web-server and session-keeping

I think it is all of them, which is what this series is about.