{"id":332,"date":"2007-09-19T10:17:24","date_gmt":"2007-09-19T09:17:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/?p=332"},"modified":"2007-09-19T10:17:24","modified_gmt":"2007-09-19T09:17:24","slug":"the-battle-for-the-dominant-web-api","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/332-the-battle-for-the-dominant-web-api.html","title":{"rendered":"The battle for the dominant Web API"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thought-provoking <a href=\"http:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/items\/2007\/09\/18.html\" target=\"_blank\">post from Joel Spolsky<\/a> on web client APIs. He says that whoever has the best AJAX library will be the next Microsoft.<\/p>\n<p>Spolsky dismisses &#8220;the p-code\/Java model&#8221; (which would include Flash and Silverlight 1.1 as well as Java applets):<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Sandboxes are penalty boxes; they\u2019re slow and they suck, which is why Java Applets are dead, dead, dead. To build a sandbox you pretty much doom yourself to running at 1\/10th the speed of the underlying platform, and you doom yourself to never supporting any of the cool features that show up on one of the platforms but not the others.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I don&#8217;t follow his logic here. First, &#8220;sandboxes&#8221; may be slow compared to true native code, but they are faster than any browser-hosted Javascript, at least until <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mozilla.org\/projects\/tamarin\/\" target=\"_blank\">Tamarin<\/a> comes along. Second, AJAX apps are generally <strong>as much or more<\/strong> hobbled than plug-in applets.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not dismissing the idea of compiling to Javascript though. There are interesting projects that do this already. In addition, Spolsky seems to be thinking along the same lines as Microsoft&#8217;s Eric Meijer, who <a href=\"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/?p=158\" target=\"_blank\">told me about<\/a> the misleadingly-named &#8220;LINQ 2.0&#8221;. But I think plug-in based apps will be important as well, both as entire applications and as rich components within AJAX apps.<\/p>\n<p>Personally I hope there will not be a &#8220;new Microsoft.&#8221; I&#8217;d like to see diversity based on web standards.<\/p>\n<div class=\"wlWriterSmartContent\" id=\"scid:0767317B-992E-4b12-91E0-4F059A8CECA8:975d9bfc-0a8c-4b8c-b68f-df2ee1796cf4\" style=\"padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 0px\">Technorati tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/joel%20spolsky\" rel=\"tag\">joel spolsky<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/flash\" rel=\"tag\">flash<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/silverlight\" rel=\"tag\">silverlight<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/microsoft\" rel=\"tag\">microsoft<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/javascript\" rel=\"tag\">javascript<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/ajax\" rel=\"tag\">ajax<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thought-provoking post from Joel Spolsky on web client APIs. He says that whoever has the best AJAX library will be the next Microsoft. Spolsky dismisses &#8220;the p-code\/Java model&#8221; (which would include Flash and Silverlight 1.1 as well as Java applets): Sandboxes are penalty boxes; they\u2019re slow and they suck, which is why Java Applets are &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/332-the-battle-for-the-dominant-web-api.html\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The battle for the dominant Web API<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,80,96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-software-development","category-web-authoring"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}