This is an innovative and creative approach to organizing files and information intuitively. I enjoyed learning about this, and it made me think of some new possibilities with regards to UI implementations.
It is perhaps not critical to understand now, but those who want to take a look at what is perhaps ahead, should consider checking out E4X, or ECMAScript for XML. It has already been implemented in SpiderMonkey and Rhino, and has been standardized in ECMA-357 standard.
http://developer.mozilla.org/presentations/xtech2005/e4x/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E4X
E4X places XML objects as first class JavaScript objects -- just like objects, arrays, functions and Regular Expressions (which I for one, need to admittedly get better with).
This is particularly attractive -- from page 11 of the E4X slides:
* Expandos make markup composition a snap!
* Just start appending extra property tiers:
var html = <html/@lt;
html.head.title = "My Page Title";
html.body.@bgcolor = "#e4e4e4";
html.body.form.@name = "myform";
html.body.form.@action = "someurl.jss";
html.body.form.@method = "post";
html.body.form.@onclick = "return somejs();";
html.body.form.input[0] = "";
html.body.form.input[0].@name = "test";
* Results in this XML:
<html>
<head>
<title>My Page Title</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#e4e4e4">
<form name="myform" action="someurl.jss"
method="post" onclick="return somejs();">
<input name="test"></input>
</form>
</body>
</html>
This free, web-based RegEx tool is great! It allows you to experiment with RegEx's and immediately get feedback on what you're trying to accomplish. Great for writing JavaScript Regular Expressions:
http://www.rexv.org/
Google Gears was released last week and it's been hugely exciting to get a look at this api, along with some of the apps people have come up with already.
Google Gears API
Obviously many of us had been looking at Adobe Apollo for awhile, and Google Gears is of the same mindset -- but even more encouraging it was released under the very liberal BSD license, which only adds encouragement to those of us excited about the rapid advancement of technology. It will be exciting to see the rapid progression of this 'platform' for offline integration of web applications. The community of web developers has so many ideas, and Google's release of Gears to the community in this manner will no doubt generate many ideas that will find their way into the next release of Gears is my only guess.
As an Ajax developer where I am particularly interested in Gears is in terms of performance, over and above online/offline synchronization as a feature. While the two go hand in hand synchronization has a specific place in many apps (internet connection dropped, queue-ing work completed offline, etc), I feel like the performance aspect of Gears with this offline database and client side file cache will become huge. I am looking forward to seeing many engineers benchmark their web applications once they have become enabled with and optimized for Gears.
Developing with Google Gears in mind, could become like Ajax has become the last two to three years. What I mean when I say that is that there are significant performance benefits that can be gained by limiting the number of trips to a server (both web and database), and processing items in batch. We have already seen this with regards to Ajax applications sending bits of data to the server rather than whole page requests, and this takes it a step further. We now have a larger set of boundaries to work with as web developers. We can choose how much to update, when to update, along with a client side failsafe. Having the cross operating system desktop intermediary is the enabler here, and the deployment potential of a large player like Google are obvious.
As Google continues its collaboration with Mozilla Firefox (I can't wait for Classes in Javacript 2.0 by the way!), and open source libraries like Dojo, it will become easier to integrate these offline caching and synch-ing paradigms into our development practices.
All of this enables richer, more responsive user experiences for the end user. It enables exciting new architectures for web applications. The future is surely bright for the paradigm of web-based applications growing in performance, capability and reach.
This is wild. For those of us awaiting the release of "spaces" in Mac OS X Leopard, in the meantime you can download VirtueDesktops
http://virtuedesktops.info/index.php/downloads/
http://virtuedesktops.info/index.php/about/
I caught the use of this during a screencast by Brad Neuberg (http://dojotoolkit.org/offline), and have been playing around with it on my Mac today. You can see him use Virtue Desktops in this screencast where he efficiently moves to different desktops. IMO, it's a great way to efficiently organize my machine. Thanks for the link, Brad!
Incidentally, the screencast is related to encrypting data with Dojo Offline. If you're interested in that screencast it is here, it's pretty sweet:
http://codinginparadise.org/video/dot/dot_encryption_small.mov
On the Google Gears mailing list Brad mentions that enabling transparent encryption and decryption will be in the Dojo Offline port that runs on top of Google Gears in about 2 weeks. Looking forward to seeing that high level lib on top of Gears!
