Is It Time To Stop Pushing the Browser Around?

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, April 19, 2007 @ 7:38 am

In my first ever real grownup consulting engagement, back in 1990, I was called in to improve the data cleaning operations of a small testing company. This was back in the days when even companies heavily dependent on computer technology relied on a single "computer guy." This particular guy had rigged up a data cleaning system on a set of state-of-the-art 80386 machines. He had set up a folding table in one corner of the office ("Machine room? What's a machine room?") and taped "Do not touch!!!" signs to the monitors. The guy would take the tapes containing maybe 20-30MB of data and run then for 6 days through his cleaning environment. If something blew up or a new defect was identified in the source data, boom! another 6 days.

When I probed a little bit about what he was using to perform this magic, I found out, to my horror, that he had implemented the whole data cleaning shebang as a set of WordPerfect macros! Ouch! Talk about the wrong tool. I recommended they buy a little Sparcstation (sorry, x86 unix was kind of expensive and unreliable back then) and solved their problem with a modest amount of Perl4.'

So what does WordPerfect have to do with Javascript in the Browser? As people have been testing the limits of Ajax, we see more sophisticated SOA and messaging concepts and abstractions making their way into the picture. Coach Wei, a clever and insightful man, has an article up now on the Nexaweb's IMB (Internet Messaging Bus).

It's a clever concept of how to introduce MOM/ESB into a browser environment (Nexaweb also supports Java and Desktop clients, as you can see in the article above). I've implemented a number of distributed apps using JMS as well as a few using ESB's such as WebMethods, Tibco and Mule. It's an eleagant way to design apps, but requires a somewhat different approach and outlook than OOP (not that you can't include OO software in the mix as a component). See Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices for a pretty good read on what's involved in building SOA systems.

I checked out a few of the applications mentioned in his article, and they we slick, responsive, elegant. Nice work by the Nexaweb folks.

So again, what does this have to do with WordPerfect macros? Using a technology in an inappropriate way will come to bite you. All that infrastructure and encapsulation and tunneling comes at a price, espectially in a still somewhat wobbly execution environment like Javascript on the browser. Sure enough, those Nexaweb apps start out nice, but over time start to peg my CPU at 100% on both IE and Firefox. Don't even think of running more than one of these apps on your machine at one time. Maybe you can put a "Do Not Touch!!!" graphic over all of the other application icons on your desktop. I don't think this is Nexaweb's fault. Javascript in the browser still has a long way to come before you can write truly reliable, complex and layered systems.

Further, lots of these boundary pushing technologies make use of characteristics of the browser that are more side-effects than features. Look at Comet, for example. Common Comet techniques such as keeping the response from the server to the browser open (in an Iframe, etc.) or streaming a multipart HTTP message via XHR don't work the same in all browsers, are not part of any browser requirements, and could change with the next release. This is no way to implement serious applications.

Now I'm not saying that Comet is a bad idea, or that Nexaweb is peddling SOA/MOM junkware. Quite the contrary. I like what I see and hope to see more. What I object to is that all of this is being done via the back door. If we are going to implement fancy communication layers in the browser, let's do it by the front door, by requesting a more robust Javascript execution environment perhaps with threading and better networking control built into the browser.

Today's browsers are not that far removed from the Netscape Navigator with Livescript (later renamed to Javascript) that I used in 1995 to toggle a few heirarchical checkboxes. We are asking them to do things they were not designed to do. As we push the envelope of what a web app is and can do, we should do so in a smart way. Otherwise we are just like that guy who took WordPerfect macros -- a tool designed to perform simple textual and menu operations -- and wrote an ETL system. Yes, it can be done, but why would you?

Technorati : ajax, coach wei, esb, jms, mom, nexaweb, soa

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1. 

   Oddly enough, I wrote a large commercial software package in WordPerfect 5.1 macros, and now I largely write Javascript for a living (though I did a lot of C++ in between).

   To answer the “why would you?” question, you have to look at the entire ecosystem of software that an individual interacts with. In the case of the WordPerfect package, a set of tools for screenwriters, our aim was to extend what was at the time the world’s most popular wordprocessor into an excellent system for the complex format of screenplays. The runtime mattered, and brought with it a large number of users.

   The Javascript runtime matters also. It is, for better or worse, the *only* standard way to get a rich, interactive presentation layer for Internet-based applications. (I’ll spare the rant about the lost opportunity of Applets for my own blog, but the sharp taste of doom still lingers whenever somebody mentions Flash, and for the same reasons.)

   So, Nexaweb is taking the entirely prudent approach of targeting a runtime that is relatively open (unlike Applets, Flash or… WordPerfect) and building some stuff on it.

   I recently heard Murry Gell-Mann talking about creative ideas. One particular thought has stayed with me — “take an idea that already exists and treat it more seriously than others have.”

   Comment by Gavin Doughtie, Friday, April 20, 2007 @ 10:17 am

2. 

   While I understand where you’re coming from, playing Devil’s advocate, I take my hat off to that WP guy: perhaps his dept. didn’t have the money or interest at that time to get the necessary personnel or tools? Maybe the boss was sluffing off funds and knew something… lol.

   Anyway, this is just how I envision progress. I say bring it on, ’til it hits a mass usability, and something will pop out for the non-ubers to flock to.

   Comment by BillyG, Friday, April 20, 2007 @ 4:18 pm

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