[erlang-questions] Two beautiful programs - or web programming made easy

[Andrew Matthews]

I wish it were that easy! Sadly, I work in a market where browser choice is more often dictated by "how easy is it to control from AD" than "how rich is the platform". That having been said, I think that whole WebSockets +/- issue was a complete red herring: The principle at work here would apply equally well in the case of COMET or Ajax-polling systems.

On a side note - I have a .NET web-based softphone system that (prior to COMET becoming widely available in the .NET tech-stack) used polling to establish duplex comms between the browser and the server. Often at rates of up to 4 Hz and for hundreds/thousands of users simultaneously. The challenge was to boil down the payload down to the absolute minimum. The end result was that we pushed all of the presentation-level intelligence off to the client, and sent state-machine vectors (i.e. a vector of the current states of each of the controlling state models, represented as integers) instead, since they were the most dense way of saying how the UI ought to look.

My point is that for fear of blowing out your bandwidth usage, you might eventually end up making the payload more and more declarative, till eventually the payload could barely be called code at all. Would you really control a UI from a server in practice, when you can push off that job to the browser itself?

Regards,

         Andrew


-----Original Message-----
> --snip --
Well it might not be universally available, but it's here and now on my machine.

All the general public have to do is change browsers, and how difficult is that?
It's one click away.

While the giants fight for market share by making their browsers mutually incompatible I just download the one that best suits my purposes.

I just want to make things as simple as possible - life is to short to play browser wars.

Hopefully a kind of software Darwinism will prevail - that's my naive belief.

Life is too short to fix broken software.

/Joe