Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Technography--gooood!

Author:Philip Suh
Posted:3/4/1999; 10:49:54 AM
Topic:ADSL
Msg #:3557 (In response to 3543)
Prev/Next:3556 / 3558

Morning everyone!


I have two points to make today:


1. Bandwidth--goood! (Ugh. grunt).



    
I agree with Dave: the technographer is the info-server, and he's going to need as much bandwidth as possible.  If the server is slow, everyone is slow and the meeting is impossible to enjoy. 
    

(Again, an online game example--how many times have I had to drop from a game because the host's machine and bandwidth are too slow? Many, many. Often a host will apologize after a game, saying that he left his 3d rendering on, or that another app was running in the background.)
    

Latency--bad. Lots of bandwidth--good.



2. Bandwidth---precious! (ugh. grunt.)



    
Since bandwidth is not free, and not unlimited, we should use that bandwidth conservatively.  Yes, I eagerly await the broadband era, but we're still on the cusp, and lots of others are not going to have broadband this year, or the year after.
    

I think Frontier is the right tool for the technographer, for 2 reasons: it's got an outliner, and it's got a server.
    

However, what do we put on the client side, and how do we talk to the client?
    

The first choice is the ubiquitous browser, because it's cheap (free) and HTTP, which is what browsers understand.
    

However, browser/HTTP is not designed for receiving broadcasts, and HTTP in particular is a little heavy for this.
    

In contrast, custom clients and protocols, like Hotline, ICQ, and those used by online games are very good at what they do--transmit data, realtime, with very little latency.  All of these employ custom clients, because we want to leverage the power of the client's hardware, while keeping the datastream as thin as possible.
    

I think it would be possible for a custom client to be put together without too much work--either in Director/Lingo/Shockwave (great interface, still uses HTTP), or a Java application (not so great, depending on the programmer, interface, but could do custom protocol). Other possibilities involve doing what Broadband Mechanics is doing with MTTF, build an application with Javascript inside the browser that gets downloaded before the meeting (downside is, as I understand it, you're still using HTTP (XML-RPC) for the protocol).
    

I talked to a Shockwave wizard last night who guesstimated it might take a week or so to come up with the custom Director app. 



Well, I hope these comments stir ideas and discussion.  If you agree/disagree, lemme know.  Next Tuesday I'm having lunch with a buddy who did a Java chat server, so I'll get to pick his brain on this.


Phil

			

There are responses to this message:
			

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:48:21 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.