Control You

Mike Shaver: If someone tells you that their platform is the web, only better, there is a very easy test that you can use

Dive Into Mark on Adobe Apollo

Following a blog-refer-thread off of Sam Ruby’s ‘Control You’ entry : Whether or not you agree with Mark Pilgrim on Flex/Flash, he writes a hell of a piece. Adobe introduced Apollo, their latest attempt to recreate the web in their own image....

Excerpt from Andrew C. Oliver's Blog at

I am trying to get a handle on adobe’s apollo, especially relative to the popular web browsers like ie, safari, and mozilla/firefox. Apollo apps can be completely “on the web”. Apollo components are becoming more open.

From what little I’ve tried so far, Apollo apps can be easier to build than using the cross-browser + ajax toolkit approach. Even so the server side can remain 100% “on the web” for anyone else’s favorite client components to consume.

I don’t get the panic about apollo. It’s like using java or vb or smalltalk components for a client: yes, the result could be non-web-like, but the result could be completely web-compatible.

Posted by Patrick Logan at

A while back, Sam came up with a brilliant question to pose to people/companies/vendors/idiots who proposed or offered “web services": "Does it support ETags?”  The answer is nearly irrelevant, since so few companies even understand the question.  They’re just in a completely different universe.

Mike Shaver is attempting to do the same thing with web applications.  If you don’t even understand why one would want to “View Source”, you’re not even in the right universe.

This is the same point I was trying to make with my “Silly Season” rant.  We go along, all of us, on the web, thinking that these companies are more or less getting it, and that the other people we’re reading and talking to and collaborating with and arguing with all basically get it.  And then something like Apollo comes along and we realize that no, there are still companies out there that fundamentally don’t get it, and there are still users out there — even on the web! — who don’t realize why the infrastructure they take for granted is so insanely great.  And we’re all kind of tired of explaining it to you, y’all, collectively, because we all figured out a long time ago why it’s insanely great — so long ago, in fact, that we have to strain to articulate it because we’re out of practice, and frankly we’re not sure you’re worth the effort.  And I don’t have a pithy one-liner to encapsulate why Apollo is so incredibly un-right that it’s not even wrong, but here are some hints:

PS - I recompiled my kernel yesterday and didn’t have to recompile my web browser to "match.”  Ask an Nvidia user why that’s cool.

Posted by Mark at

Mark said:

“This is the same point I was trying to make with my “Silly Season” rant.  We go along, all of us, on the web, thinking that these companies are more or less getting it, and that the other people we’re reading and talking to and collaborating with and arguing with all basically get it.  And then something like Apollo comes along ........ And I don’t have a pithy one-liner to encapsulate why Apollo is so incredibly un-right that it’s not even wrong, but here are some hints:”

Thing is if you don’t explain it (and practice to explain better) then you’re always going to run into these kinds of people and their mistaken beliefs.  Sideways references and pithy one liners aren’t going to educate these people only time, patience and repeated attempts to convey the message as to why you claim “the web is great” will get close to achieving that goal.

The other option is to simply leave them to it.  If you choose to do that because:

“.....we’re all kind of tired of explaining it to you, y’all, collectively, because we all figured out a long time ago why it’s insanely great — so long ago, in fact, that we have to strain to articulate it because we’re out of practice”

....are you surprised that people still don’t get it?  And why bother complaining about it?  IMHO that simply paints a negative picture which puts people off and makes it even less likely they’ll get it.

Posted by Dan Creswell at

Add your comment












Nav Bar