Comments on: David vs. Goliath vs. Goliath

Laszlo Systems CTO David Temkin is taking an open-source gamble to woo Web developers from Macromedia and Microsoft.

[dsherr1]

The future is here, just not evenly distributed

The title has recently been attributed to Paul Saffo by John Doerr, but I heard it from I think it was from Fred Thompson at Cal Tech in 1970 (sic). At a Churchill Club event, along with Esther Dyson and John MacNamee, John was proclaiming 2005 as the year when the chasm of Web Services will be crossed. So David Temkin is right on with his timing according to them.

Open source versus proprietary, however, somewhat misses the point. Web Services are converging on a small number of standards and may the best implementations win. The key is not the tools for development per se, but the emerging business (empahsis on "business") service network ecosystems which will rely upon the Internet (capital "I--I am retro) and a common, secure, manageable and testable infrastructure. Some firms are there with service offerings that enable an ecosystem, viz., Amazon Web Services. It is a case of following the money and the developers will follow also.

[Ubber geek]

emerging business

http://www.analogstereo.com/jaguar_owners_manual.htm

Smart Clients already well supported by .NET

So-called "smart clients" are already well supported on .NET and IE. You can download and run compiled .NET user controls on the IE browser, that run in a restricted security sandbox just like java applets. Since these are compiled using public/private key technology, if you wish to increase permissions for a specific publisher, you can do so based on the public key.

Here is an example of VG.net vector graphics running in the browser:
http://weblogs.asp.net/frank_hileman/archive/2004/07/23/192509.aspx

Note that this example runs fine with the default, restricted permission set. No installation is required.