RIA Weekly #014 – Google Gears, Web 2.0 Expo, RIA Back-ends, Curl

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Coté and Ryan start off with some bumpy introductions and then Dion Almaer, our special guest for the week, introduces himself. Dion and Ryan were at Web 2.0 Expo and gave a combined talk about Google Gears and Adobe AIR (slides).

The conversation starts with Web 2.0 Expo. Dion says that the highlight of the event was Fake Steve Jobs. Dion notes that there haven’t been any really standout applications and Ryan concurs saying he thought it was “regular Web 2.0 stuff”. Ryan asks Dion what his favorite session is and Dion correctly responds that it was the combined session they did. Dion gives an overview of the session and talking about how he and Ryan covered some of the APIs and where the browser is going. Dion says his goal is to get more people involved in advancing the browser.

Coté asks about whether Google Gears is open source (it is) and then asks about external contributers and Dion says that they have started getting external people in on the project. We get into the topic of open source and Coté says he’d like to see a diagram that makes it very obvious what is open source and what isn’t from a variety of companies.

One of the things that comes up is offline access and what that means even when you have an internet connection. Dion gives the example of Buxfer which uses Google Gears to store banking information on the hard drive of the user in the SQLite database and none of it is ever stored on the startups servers. Dion describes Gears as an “open source way to teach browsers to do new tricks”. Dion follows up by saying that if HTML5 implemented all the new features and Gears was no longer needed, it would be a win. The group discusses the evolution of HTML 5 and where Gears will eventually fit.

Coté asks Dion “What’s the deal with WebKit” because there’s been a ton of interest around WebKit. Dion says the biggest thing with WebKit is that the code is cleaner than Gecko (Firefox) and that entices more people to jump into the WebKit community. The clean code also helps people iterate faster and add important features.

We then get into what’s coming down the pipe at JavaOne. Dion brings up the point that Java has had a lot of really cool stuff for a long time and if they could bring their pieces together to do things like Mesh and EC2, Sun could have been doing this a while ago.

Dion and Ryan both stopped by the Curl booth and chatted with them so Ryan picks Dion’s brain on Curl. Dion noted that the demos were kind of ugly and suggested that if you’re competing against Adobe and Microsoft you’ve got to have good looking demos. We all agree that the technology is great but that the web has a certain way to develop things and it’s better to fit with that model. Coté wonders out loud about getting involved in the middleware side of RIAs instead of focusing on the client plugin.

Coté brings up OpenLaszlo and we talk about what they’re up to. Dion says he really likes them because they went “meta” and did a combination of Flash and Ajax. We also talk about Intuit’s QuickBase and get into the development platforms as a service.

Disclaimer: see the RedMonk client list for a clients mentioned.