-1.preview.jpg)
My friend and former colleague Ingo posts about his dedicated AllPeers server, cobbled together MacGyver-style from an old laptop. (He refers to me as his “crazy ex-colleague”, though I can’t imagine why. The voices in my head keep reassuring me that I’m perfectly sane.) His post is in German, so for those whose Teutonic language skills are lacking, the gist is that he loves AllPeers except for the fact that people can only get at your files when you’re online. So he dug up an old computer and set it up to run AllPeers 24/7. Not only is it functional, but with its sporty Weapons of Mass Distribution t-shirt, it’s one of the most fashionable servers in the neighborhood.
Note that if you want to run your regular AllPeers account on one machine and a dedicated server on another, you might want to take a look at our caching user extra.
As a newly minted Apple fan boy, I’m naturally enamoured with the iPhone, iMac (though I don’t own one) and all things “i”. But I have to say that with IMAP, Apple has really outdone itself. Thanks, Steve, you’ve totally revolutionized my email consumption experience.
(rim shot)
But seriously. Until very recently, I’ve been a fully POP-enabled shop, with Thunderbird as my mail client. My email has resided on my laptop and nowhere else, so I never had problems with synchronization. But I have had a number of issues that led me to seek a better solution. In particular, I don’t always want to be schlepping around my laptop. And Thunderbird lacks certainly capabilities like full-text indexing that have been looking more and more like necessities.
This came to a head when I finally got a smartphone (though an iPhone, not a Nokia E90 as I originally expected). Suddenly synchronization became a big issue, and last time I was traveling I ended up closing Thunderbird, configuring OS X’s Mail app to use my POP server (since TB can’t redirect mails based on a filter) and sending all new mails to Gmail, where I could pick them up from my phone. This was a clunky solution, to say the least; the cherry on the cake was that I had to clean out my Thunderbird inbox when I got home and loaded all the mails received during the trip (which I had instructed Mail to leave on the server) into what was (and is) still my primary email client.
Anyway, when Google announced that it had added IMAP support to Gmail, I was eager to give it a try. Sure enough, it’s brilliant. I can continue to use Thunderbird in exactly the same way as before when I’m sitting at my laptop. (Lifehacker has an excellent article about how to configure TB for optimal use with Gmail.) Setting up IMAP on my phone was a snap as well. I can access my mail from any web-enabled computer using Gmail directly, with its innovative handling of labels and threads, not to mention the fact that I can full-text search my entire email database in milliseconds. I’ve already unearthed a number of mails that I would never have found otherwise. I can even browse mails on my phone that I’ve filtered into other folders, like mailing lists and bugmails, something that would be impossible with POP. And obviously my mails are now synchronized across all these devices.
Kudos to Google for getting on the IMAP bandwagon, as I can imagine that this is a real challenge to implement in a way that scales.
I’ve had some time to reflect on my recent musings about how to push forward innovation on the web without ceding dominance to closed, proprietary technologies. Several people pointed out that I was embarrassingly uninformed with regard to ECMAScript 4 support in Internet Explorer. The ScreamingMonkey project has been around for a while with the aim of achieving exactly that. And I’m so open-minded that I still think this is a fantastic idea, even though it apparently isn’t mine.
I read more closely what the Microsoft people have to say about the situation, and I’m actually finding myself sympathetic to both sides of the argument. Microsoft’s line is that a substantially revised JavaScript language doesn’t make much sense since there are already mature languages like Python and Ruby that could serve our second-generation web scripting needs. Backwards compatibility is all well and good, but people are still going to be reluctant to use new language features if they aren’t widely supported by browser vendors. I’m not a language designer so I can’t speak definitively about the challenges of supporting both ES3 and ES4 syntaxes, but this is bound to introduce a fair amount of complexity and redundancy into the scripting engine implementation. Simply adding Python support might be a more sensible path.
On the other hand, JavaScript has amazing mindshare on the web, and from a pure marketing standpoint it may be easier to achieve widespread usage of modern scripting constructs if they are promoted under the JavaScript brand. Moreover, Brendan has undoubtedly forgotten more about language design than I’ll ever know, and he is obviously convinced that ES4 will provide a smoother transition path than an entirely new language like Python. On a strategic level, Microsoft considers JavaScript to be a Mozilla technology, explaining why the former is eager to jettison it while the latter wants to see it reinvigorated. That’s how the market works (and works well).
The other pillar of the future web (and another favorite topic here on Peer Pressure) is markup. The shortcomings of HTML for application development (as opposed to document representation) are clear. At the same time, I find it hard to get too enthusiastic about XUL. This may be a case of familiarity breeding contempt, but in my experience XUL user interfaces are more functional than attractive. I’m not crazy about certain XUL features like XUL Templates, whose syntax strikes me as obscure. There are some very cool XUL-related technologies like XBL (if it had better error reporting), but the bottom line is that the idea of XUL on the web hasn’t gained much traction.
In the long term, someone like WHATWG may address HTML’s shortcomings as a language for app development. But as with the scripting debate, it’s worth considering whether there isn’t an existing language that could fit the bill. The obvious choice is Adobe’s MXML, which is used by Flex to build user interfaces. Whereas XUL UIs tend to be rather drab, the flashier Flex demos I’ve seen had me positively drooling. Adobe has already open sourced Flex, and it has donated its open source Tamarin virtual machine to the Mozilla project (something that still warms my heart every time I think about it). I’ve already blogged about Brendan blogging about a potential harmonization of XUL and MXML. And while Flex is still a relatively recent innovation, Flash continues to be astonishingly successful, and it’s reasonable to expect that Flex will be able to leverage to great effect the huge Flash development community and near ubiquitous Flash runtime.
I got sick of looking at the boring default iPhone wallpaper, so I asked our graphic designer Sasha to whip up something a bit more personalized:
It turns out it’s hard to take a photo of an iPhone without getting all kinds of glare and whatnot, so I used Erica Sadun’s sweet little iPhone screenshot utility and asked Sasha to photoshop the result into a professional iPhone photo found on the web. (My graphical skills being exactly nil, as regular readers will know.)
You can download the image I used if you want to spruce up your own iPhone.
Brendan Eich delivers a vicious smackdown to Microsoft for dissembling their motives regarding ECMAScript 4 (JavaScript 2). In essence, Microsoft is pushing back against ES4, claiming it is unnecessarily complex, while simultaneously touting its own full-blown web development framework (C#, .NET, Silverlight and friends). The reeks of hypocrisy and serves as further proof that Microsoft is continuing to employ its famous “embrace and extend” strategy on the web.
I can’t resist pointing out that, when I made a similar argument for improving web markup, the very same Brendan smacked me down for pragmatic reasons:
jgraham already pointed out the Prisoner’s Dilemma facing browser vendors trying to gain market share. Cooperate with the purity police while IE continues to defect? You lose.
Be that as it may, we’re all on the same side here, and the real question is how to push forward innovation on the web despite the daunting inertia of a billion legacy web browsers, most of which are controlled by a corporate entity that is pursuing its own strategic agenda. Whether we’re talking about better markup or better scripts, we quickly bump up against the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” that Brendan evokes.
I can see two possible solutions. One is a true paradigm shift. If people stop using web browsers as we currently know them in favor of, say, Rich Internet Application platforms like AIR or Prism, there will be an opportunity to deploy superior technologies that break with the past. In this scenario backwards compatibility is nice-to-have but not essential. For example, Google might decide to implement some future generation of Gmail on top of an RIA runtime in order to provide a more compelling user experience. In this case, I could easily see them opting for Mozilla’s open Prism technology rather than Adobe’s or Microsoft’s proprietary stack. If most people end up with Mozilla’s runtime on their machines, strategic control of web technologies would slip from Microsoft’s grasp.
The other option is to out-embrace and out-extend Microsoft. This might involve taking a page out of Adobe’s book by developing an ActiveX for IE that let’s users run ES4 and other goodies without having to convince Microsoft itself to play along. As it transpires, an ActiveX control for the Gecko rendering engine already exists, so there may not be too many technical obstacles to achieving this. Much more of a challenge, of course, is getting the deployment story right so that enough people end up installing the control in their browser.
The sad fact is that cooperating with web standards efforts that threaten the viability of its own strategic web initiatives is simply not in Microsoft’s interest, maddening as this may be. It won’t be easy, but pulling an end run around the Evil Empire and beating them at their own game is probably the only real option. And it’ll be oh so satisfying if we can pull it off.
