Re: [eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] E4 towards generic connection management

[Kevin McGuire <Kevin_McGuire@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi gang,

> I fully agree that in a world where the "Network"
is becoming more
> important than the local client, a generic approach
for the user to
> manage connections of all kinds will simplify
user experience
> (and help reducing code duplication and bloat).

About a year ago I was looking into an area they were
terming "WebOS".  The notion was that for rich applications,
you need some kind of lightweight platform pre-installed on the desktop
from which you could serve up applications written against it (presumably
in JS or PHP or whatever).  One platform service was of course a communication
framework, since generally some or all of your data is going to be on the
server. This included synchronization as a first class platform service
so you can treat the local storage as a cache or offline access. There
were a number of players in this area (approx. 4-5 companies).  I
don't the current state.

At the time, my reaction was, "Hmm, we could
be one of those!". We essentially have all the components they talked
about, though not integrated to the same degree, and with p2 we have a
first class provisioning route.

I view this issue as being intimately tied to the
flexible resource model topic. For real data mobility, instead of assuming
that resources map to files as we do now, we should assume they map to
URIs, served up from anywhere (e.g. a MySQL database), with local proxies
providing anything from summary information (name, size), enough say for
navigation, to the full contents for editing purposes. Current desktop
services such as Search then need to be changed since the number of resource
can be huge, and searchable content could be remote.

So this is a very different notion of "the platform"
than what we have now. A pretty cool one though!

There a more thoughts squirreled away in my brain
somewhere ...

Regards,
Kevin "Not Just About Pretty UIs" McGuire