Web Professionals in the Willamette Valley

Comment by Jason Prothero on November 19, 2009 at 5:25pm

Colleen, If you need some partners on the front-end, feel free to drop us a line.

Comment by Jason Prothero on November 20, 2009 at 8:31am

If anyone is curious about using the cloud for hosting data/websites, the Corvallis .NET Users Group is having a former Microsoft guy come down and talk about MS Azure. Azure is Microsoft's version of cloud computing and is free for the time being.

I know, its Microsoft, but I'm guessing many of the same principles apply to Amazon Web Services and other cloud options.

Here's the event info:

Jason Mauer Presents the Windows Azure Platform

Also, John Sechrest will be talking Startup Weekend and may be buying a few refreshments...

Comment by Hope Leman on November 20, 2009 at 8:59am

Hi, guys. I am already learning a lot from this group--I am still trying to wrap my head around the idea of a browser-less world. What would that look like? Can you draw me a verbal picture, Colleen? For instance, how would I access the page we are on right now?

And thanks for the mention of Azure, Jason. I had seen one or two references to it but was too lazy to take the time to figure out what it was. This group is insta-symposium! Thanks, Loyan!

Hope

Comment by Jason Prothero on November 20, 2009 at 9:02am

Hope,

Check out what Google thinks:

What is Google Chrome OS?

Comment by Hope Leman on November 20, 2009 at 9:12am

Hi, Jason--thanks! It was funny and edifying. I wonder what Firefox thinks.

Kind of confusing that Google is using the word Chrome for both the browser and the operating system--which doesn't really seem to be an operating system at all but a sort of uber browser. What a great video--thanks again.

Comment by Colleen Dick on November 20, 2009 at 1:12pm

Kinda like the Google Chrome video, you would just be ON your puter and everything is in the cloud. I'm too much of a control freak to go for it 100% in its present state. I like to have my stuff (at least some of it) where I can actually touch it. But even that's silly. I have my Itunes on a terrabyte. I can touch the terrabyte but I can't really touch the tunes.

Comment by Loyan Roylance on December 1, 2009 at 12:19pm

Right on. Now this little shin dig is starting to heat up. Did you guys know Laport is throwing a party just for this group? Yeehaw!

Comment by Colleen Dick on December 1, 2009 at 9:50pm

When is the party?

Comment by Jill Burrows on December 1, 2009 at 10:54pm

I'm curious about the party too. The details are probably still being worked out, no?

I was just thinking about the browser-less concept that was thrown around earlier. People already are moving in that direction with iPhone apps and desktop twitter clients. Most of those drop the HTML aspect and either communicate with JSON, XML, YAML, or some other format. All tend to use RESTful APIs when dealing. Naturally a browser uses a RESTful API because the person who introduced the term also helped write the HTTP protocol.

Currently OAuth requires a browser of some sort. It's easier to authorize web applications, because those requests are not out of band and all authorization can be completed in the browser. If the application has both a web and desktop counterpart that authorization can happen once and the web application and desktop app could technically use the same authorization. That has unfortunate side effect of opening up a security hole in OAuth.

Any future applications or operating systems will need to provide standard functionality for rendering different types of XML for those instances where one needs to just read data like XHTML, MathML, or MusicML.

Then there's what Google is doing which takes any problems with OAuths out of band authorizations and tosses it out the window -- everything is a web app.

I've downloaded the source for both Chromium and Chromium OS. Appearently, it's based on a heavily tweaked Ubuntu system and it seems like it would compile on Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope. I've had problems compiling both the browser and the OS in the new version of Ubuntu I'm running. They've also switched to a different build system from when I first built it (they've opted to use a traditional Unix makefile approach, as opposed to Google's "hammer" tools). I'll see if they've submitted a patch, other have had the same problem. I'll make a USB disk image for you all to try if you want.

Chrome has support for O3D, in browser OpenGL 3D rendering support scripted with Javascript. You can click on 3D objects and interact with them. They have a version of 3D chess here. It's the very last demo.

Personally, I'd like to have an option of developing browser side code in something other than Javascript. I'd like to see browser technology extended to be able to run Python, Ruby, Java, Scala, and perhaps MSIL/CIL (for all you .NET folks).

I think that moving to a standardized RESTful paradigm where all UI/view is marked up declaratively, controlled via a set of standard languages, and all models/data storage along with super heavy data processing is offloaded to the cloud is the future. I also wouldn't mind a version of Ubiquitous Computing happening soon where everything that we have with computing power is networked ultra-efficiently into a universal computing mesh.

Just throwing thoughts out at you all. I'll probably write a blog entry on it sometime soon.

Comment by Jason Prothero on December 8, 2009 at 12:27pm

To all who went to Startup Weekend...

What did you think?

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