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Thursday, April 06, 2006

Remote Blogging

I'm actually writing this from the Pontiac Coffee House in Springdale, while waiting for Heather to get out of her bellydance class. It was supposed to end at 8:30, but they're having some belly-drama, so I'm not holding my breath.

My activity for tonight was going to this month's NWADNUG meeting. The speaker, Caleb Jenkins, did a pretty good job demoing Atlas, Microsoft's take on Ajax. It really is looking pretty cool. What I'm most interested in, though, is a way of adapting those approaches to the desktop realm. That's actually what MS is doing with Avalon and smart clients, I think, and it has some promise. Even on a desktop and LAN-connected server, if you're pulling from thousands of list items, it's hard to auto-complete stuff. If you can do that in an Ajaxy way in a Windows form, then it becomes pretty easy.

I'm also contemplating the possibilities presented by essentially doing what Google Desktop Search does, by presenting the client UI in a web interface. Interesting thoughts.

Those thoughts are also counter to what I've been working on in Rails and Seaside on my own, but honestly, even though I love Ruby and Smalltalk as languages, if MS can make those things even easier -- or, in the case of desktop web clients, possible -- then that's a hard pill to spit out.

Did I mention that they served really good kool-aid tonight?

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