Hello orbiters,

Last week, over some coffees, Michael revealed the future of the web to me. It took him a good fifteen minutes to fully explain Comet, the technology behind the browser side of the Orbited, and another fifteen to spell out the strain Comet applications place on traditional web servers, and Orbited’s architecture. By the end of the half hour, it was clear to me that Orbited is the way forward: I wager it will be in wide use within a year.

I’ve never been a fan of web applications from a user interface perspective, as compared to the power, flexibility, and responsiveness of desktop apps. In short: web applications, on the whole, suck. And one of the main reasons they suck is because nothing happens in real time. Events on the server side can’t trigger the browser’s interface, until Comet. Comet lets web apps handle real-time applications like board games or chat, and Orbited makes Comet easy. Today, I still prefer a well-designed desktop application to a web application whenever possible. But I can access a web app from an internet cafe in Mexico, or a friend’s Windows machine. A web app I create can likewise be used by anyone with a computer, anywhere in the world. And with Orbited, web apps take another leap forward.

I’m sold. I’m joining the project, with a few things on the todo list:

• Proofread the website content. Michael is a great programmer, and a decent writer, but terrible at catching his spelling and grammar errors.
• Get rid of that god-awful logo. For one thing, it still says “Orbit”. I’m hoping someone else steps up to fix it, but in another couple of weeks I won’t be able to stand it any more.
• Try to get client APIs going for a few more languages. I don’t have any Ruby, Perl, or PHP experience to speak of, so any such ports should be a good learning experience.
• Fix up some of the diagrams for the site, and for Michael’s in-progress paper. He makes diagrams with MS Paint. And while they’re informative, they are a bit, shall we say, homely, for my taste.
• Make a Tic Tac Toe demo app.

In the meantime, I’ll be spending the next few days at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. I’ll be back on this blog sometime after that.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 9th, 2007 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.