On 7/14/15 12:50 PM, Peter Fairbrother wrote:

     On 14/07/15 18:02, Stephen D. Williams wrote:

     Everything will be run in the cloud and browser because it is,
     overall,
     a better computation model.

     It is? Why?

   The browser provides a super feature / security / quality / portable
   baseline that is rapidly improving.  Only a few alternatives come close
   and they all fall short in major ways: Qt (which greatly relies on
   browser tech now), Java & C#, Unity, UnReal, etc.  Certain things are
   still better in those alternatives, but less and less.  With Javascript
   optimization, ASM.js, SIMD.js, WebGL, etc., browsers have, for most
   purposes, resolved the computational gap while having massively better
   security stance.  WebComponents, the new binary Javascript format,
   along with WebRTC, WebUSB, and other features, we're getting the
   cleanest app and platform model we've seen so far.
   The key architectural questions about remote communication involve
   security, efficiency, stability, portability, etc.  While it isn't
   perfect, web tech provides a nice enough model for expressing the
   highest level logical communication needed in secure (enough for most
   purposes), flexible, efficient enough, and low latency enough for most
   purposes ways.  Solutions like Swagger, Go, and other modern techniques
   are much cleaner and simpler than previous clunky solutions.
   Most of the most interesting web apps now run almost completely in the
   browser.  The server side sends the original page and code, manages
   authentication, then acts mostly as a database with minimal logic.  As
   long as the API doesn't rely solely on client-side validation and other
   things that could be gamed, it can still be secure.  Because it's now
   easy to run the same code on the front and back, complex validation
   could be done on the front-end for low latency and the backend for
   actual security, for instance.
   There are plenty of things that could be better and will get better,
   but regardless the power & ease gap between web app development, for
   most situations, is only increasing.  Emulating any substantial subset
   of browser-level UI and other features in a non-browser desktop app is
   nearly impossible now.

     -- Peter Fairbrother

   sdw