title: HTML 5, the Cloud and the future of desktop computing link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/html-5-the-cloud-and-the-future-of-desktop-computing/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 120 created: 2010/10/04 12:45:34 created_gmt: 2010/10/04 12:45:34 comment_status: open post_name: html-5-the-cloud-and-the-future-of-desktop-computing status: publish post_type: post

HTML 5, the Cloud and the future of desktop computing

There’s an interesting article over on LWN that quotes a discussion thread over on one of the Fedora Project management lists. The original poster is Mike McGrath:

This is a pretty dramatic proposal, my hopes are it will generate much discussion. It’s no secret I’m not big on the future of the desktop[1]. With great reflection and further research I’ve come to realize something else. Google is about to destroy just about everyone. There’s a tiny handful of people that don’t like the idea of cloud computing and information “in the cloud”. The majority of the world though in love with it or will be and not know it. The problem: Free Software is in no position to compete with the web based applications of the Google of tomorrow.

HTML 5 plays a big role in all this, as Mike points out:

HTML5 adds some amazing new features. Local database, offline storage, canvas and inline SVG to name just a few. If you do a little research you’ll see Google employees are tipping their hand. Many are releasing youtube videos of the work they’re doing. Google has a great deal of institutional knowledge about HTML5. Very interesting since the standard isn’t even complete yet. When it is, they’ll be ready and those applications won’t look ANYTHING like what the web apps today look like. They’ll look like native desktop apps.

The basic premise of the original list posting was that it’s time for the Fedora Project to be re-aligned as a platform to support cloud computing, specifically the kind of HTML 4 uber-applications that Google will be pushing out into the cloud. As Mike put it:

So what am I proposing? I think Fedora should slowly transition itself to be similar to how the Apache Software Foundation is setup. We should put more resources into fedorahosted and grow it. (Perhaps our new infrastructure lead would agree? ;) but the infrastructure is only one tiny part of it. We build these applications, get communities around them then let OTHERS actually run them. We’d need engineering coordinators, architects, planners. Not just from Red Hat but from other major stakeholders as well. We create these tools for others.

Although I’m not sure how I feel about the proposal, it and the (sometimes borderline rude) comments that follow are a good antidote to the firefighter doldrums that many of us on the front lines of system administration find ourselves in.

Of course Google’s cloud applications aren’t the only challenge facing “traditional” operating system platforms. As one commenter (taken a little out of context from a mini-debate over whether phones have become/will continue to be the real personal computing platform of choice for most people, a platform already in the process of being dominated by Google’s Android) says:

The Linux desktop is behind the eight-ball because of the technical problems and fragmentation that people refuse to address and instead try to patch over with package management systems. The web is good for Linux desktop because it takes the distribution of applications out of the hands of the distributions. It eliminates the middle man.

There’s also some humor (and least from a sysadmin perspective), like this:

“There’s a huge pool of web developers with HTML and JS skills that can now contribute to desktop apps. Watch how fast GNOME and KDE advance when this happens.”

That’s like saying that there’s a huge pool of high-school physics teacher who can now contribute to solving cold fusion.

I’ve worked in the web industry for years. The last freaking people you want touching code are web developers. They are — with very few exceptions — utterly freaking useless for anything other than building broken, slow, buggy applications that are just hodge-podges of cut-n-pasted jQuery scripts (which themselves are atrocious monstrosities of poor engineering) that function so long as you don’t look at them the wrong way.

… The cool web apps you see springing up are not the work of web developers. They’re the work of real programmers — people with an extensive background in C, LISP, Java, or all of the aforementioned — who decided to toy around with HTML and JS.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo