His saving grace is his Xforms standards based toolset. However I think he’d have more of a chance if it was open sourced and pushed as a viable alternative. He also needs to add on/off-line sync capability – without that u won’t get the ‘in the cloud’ appls.

Lal

No…I really, really am getting at the fact that you can take a “perfectly good web app”, and give it an additional interface.

To illustrate: you’ve spent months creating a web-based accounts package that rivals Sage (for example); with Sidewinder you can give it the final twist by allowing it to run just as if it was a desktop application. It’s light years from being an ‘either/or’ proposition…we’re saying that the exact same mark-up and code that you used to create your online version, now works for your offline one. Take a look at the number of web-based applications that have an additional downloadable, installable component–Flickr, Picasa, Google Desktop, Yahoo! toolbars, and on, and on–and you’ll see that this isn’t a ‘maybe one day’ feature, it’s something that is needed now. But why fire up your C# compiler to produce a Flickr download manager? Why not just use the same HTML, script, XForms, or whatever that you used for the web version, and wrap it in a ‘host’ that gives you features that are closer to the operating system: you could use system tray messages instead of alert boxes; you could queue up images to be sent to the server if the machine was off-line; you could use batch files to post the contents of a certain directory each night. The key point here is that you don’t need to use a different language to write your application, provided that your HTML/XForms/script gets some beefier features than are normally available in a browser.

And not only does this make it easier and quicker to build applications, but it also lifts the constraint on applications that they need to be either web-based (and so run in a browser) or desktop based (and so written in Java or C#). Many applications can be written with web technologies, but that doesn’t mean they fit the ‘browser’ paradigm. I’m constantly pressing ‘File > Save’ on the browser menus when using Google Docs, for example!

All the best,

Mark

thanks for the comments, and I’ll follow the links you offered.

I do – before following your links – totally get and accept the ‘rich internet applications’ space, and the bridging of the gap between the desktop and the cloud. However, I’d always perceived the value as being the other way around; having our remaining desktop applications draw, transparently, upon the capabilities of remote data and services rather than taking perfectly good web apps and chaining them to the desktop.

However, maybe that was what you were actually getting at, and I should follow those links before engaging in any more thinking-out-loud…!

Paul

You say:

Mark made much of its power to take applications in the cloud, and run them like desktop apps. Erm… why would I want to?

I think I made the mistake of assuming that this was obvious. The web apps conference earlier in the week had a number of discussions about bridging the gap between the desktop and the web, and there are umpteen conferences on ‘rich internet applications’ coming up that will be looking at the same subject matter. And so I foolishly took for granted that the audience at mashup* would think what I was describing was a good development. However, since you’re certainly not the only person who has asked that question, I obviously judged wrongly.

Apologies for that, but the result is that I’m going to try to write a better introduction to what Sidewinder does, and why.

In the meantime, over in the comments section of a photo of me, there is a short discussion on Sidewinder and Apollo that might help a little. (The thread of comments is not about the photo of me you’ll be pleased to hear! It’s just that the person who took the photo at the mashup* event, also made a reference to Sidewinder.)

Also, I hope you don’t mind if I link to a post of mine that has a screenshot of the final demo I did, which may be of interest since there’s an explanation of the components.

Thanks for the mention.

Mark

Thanks to an invitation from Vecosys, I gave a keynote presentation at last night’s mashup * event.
It was held at BT’s astounding conference centre, which possibly has the best conference facilities I’ve seen. It was fully equipped w…