Web or Desktop?

Many people interested in RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) are trying to make the web more like the desktop. These are very commendable efforts. One good example is WebOnSwing that I bumped into today. However, I think the other way around will be much more successful. See the arguments here, here and here. Also see the excellent WeatherBlox demo. Problem is it shows "Wednesday Lo 40°" and yet I cannot select that text to paste somewhere. Why? Because there is a wall between the web and Flash. It's not that WeatherBlox cannot be enhanced to support this. The issue is it doesn't naturally because it is NOT the web; or otherwise Flash will have to behave like a web browser.

Excited about 1060 NetKernel

I bumped into 1060 NetKernel several times before. Only this time it really registered because recently I have been thinking about REST, closure/block, Cornerstone Shell, functional language for service orchestration/composition, etc. at roughly the same time.

Active URI is the killer: active:serviceuri+arg1@arg1uri+arg2@arg2uri... Example: active:xslt+operand@file:/my.xml+operator@file:/mytransform.xsl. This is basically Cornerstone's registry entry for an invocation. The referenced invcations are just closures/blocks/lazily evaluated. It's so exciting to see so many concepts coming together fitting each other!

Another pleasant surprise is in what they call Dependency Caching and what I call Forward Propagation Model. I am glad to see someone else has actually implemented this idea I had a long time ago.

I look forward to exploring 1060 NetKernel in details.