David Emery Online

Hi there, I’m David. This is my website. I work in music for Apple. You can find out a bit more about me here. On occasion I’ve been known to write a thing or two. Please drop me a line and say hello. Views mine not my employers.

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Plugin Powered Javascript

9 May 2007

This is quite interesting, not so much for what it is but the general ideas behind it: Iris: Example of combining Java applets and Ajax

To start with, the video they present is very slick (and I’m only going on the video at the moment as the site isn’t loading); I’m quite impressed with the desktop <-> web interaction they’ve got going on, it seems to work quite nicely. I’m much less impressed with the touting of 3d in browser as being a first, as you’ve been able to do 3d in Shockwave for ages now – I’ve even seen passable 3d in Flash 9, so it’s hardly revolutionary.

What I find most interesting though is the idea of combining a plug-in based architecture with a javascript powered html front end. A plugin for the heavy lifting, masked from the user (to prevent interface differences and usability issues) with a “traditional” dynamic html interface (what a lot of people think of when they say “ajax”).

Now, in this example they’re using the latest version of Java which not a lot of people have installed, and I think there are several critical UI problems that would prevent me from ever deploying a site using a Java plugin (such as the epic startup time, or the platform inconsistent widgets) but if we look past that the fundamental model is quite interesting: the JS requests some form of computationally complicated request (like an image manipulation, for example) from the plugin, which then (via a call back) passes the result back to the JS for display.

Using that sort of technique we could really add a bit of power to traditional websites, without having to sacrifice usability or the UI.

A more obvious candidate – although probably more limiting then Java – as the backend would be Flash. It certainly packs more power then plain Javascript, and is almost certainly a lot faster – I wonder what we could offload to Flash in the background to enhance and speedup our JS based sites?

PPJ: Plugin Powered Javascript. Everything needs an acronymn. You heard it here first.

From: Articles

9 May 2007