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

Re: Linux GUI

Author:Don Hopkins
Posted:3/4/1999; 3:37:56 PM
Topic:DHTML MTTF!
Msg #:3589 (In response to 3560)
Prev/Next:3588 / 3590

Nice idea but it will be extremely slow and totally impracticle in practice.

The quality of the GUI has a lot to do with its responsiveness, and the level of integration with the application. If you can't maintain a tight, high bandwidth feedback loop between the application and the display and input processing in the front end, it's extremely difficult to implement anything resembling direct manipulation or high level semantic feedback, and you're stuck with a bunch of ugly stock pushbuttons, checkboxes, and sliders.

Think how ugly and sluggish the user interface to (say) the Director timeline editor would be, if all it could use were somebody's "standard" set of widgets via XML/RPC.

Dynamic HTML and plug-in scripting language engines are the way to go.

Java Beans are designed to lock you into doing everything in Java, and slapping a loose slugish layer of distributed XMP/RPC (or CORBA) isn't going to "integrate" them with other languages tightly enough for prime time.

It's just a bad idea to use a piece of software that was expressly designed as a political weapon for the war against Microsoft, as if it were designed with the interests of the users or developers in mind. I would much rather use software whose primary design goal was "to be robust and easy to use", than "to put microsoft out of business".

-Don

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