[Mono-dev] visual webgui for mono?

[latency]

It may be a little of topic, but after reading your email I took a closer look 
on the AjaxOS Demo Video (which was very impressive by the way) and during 
that some interesting thoughts come up.

First of all, I was thinking about the Vision of AjaxOS that all applications 
will become services which are available in the Internet by using your web 
browser. This form of application distribution shall lead to certain 
advantages, like updates need only be deployed on the server and all user of 
the app will get them and so on.

But at the end of the Video some guy asked if the AjaxOS Spreadsheet program 
is able to run macros, which it isn't. Because of the transformation and 
interaction between the server and the client was way to complex since the 
spreadsheet must be converted back and forth between ODF and HTML in the 
process. In addition, the Applications also don't really look like native 
applications, they don't lose their "web-touch".

However I like his ideas and thought to myself, can't we avoid the HTML and 
WWW overhead and make the user experience more "classic" applications without 
losing the advantages?

I mean, why can't I just type /usr/bin/mono mono://whatever.mono-project.com 
into my console and I get the App I requested?

Technically speaking: Why can't the application be run at the server but the 
output will be transmitted to the client and the mono environment has a 
generic interface which shows me the app as if I would run it locally?

The client could have some kind of container which gets the intermediate 
language from the server. Processes the local code like drawing the frame or 
validation checks on some TextBoxes and then resubmittes the local code back 
to the server if necessary.

If I'm not mistaken Microsoft is working on something similar for the .NET 
Framework 3.0 in Windows Vista, to run and distribute small apps directly 
from the net.

Would be happy to get some comments and feedback if I'm still sane. :-)
Regards, Valentin

On Monday 24 July 2006 17:23, Jesse Guardiani wrote:
> I just ran across this today while search compulsively for things like
> "AJAX WebOS", "AJAX Internet Operating System", and "AJAX Web Desktop":
>    http://www.visualwebgui.com
>
> Looks really slick. I think the concept is that you code using the normal
> WinForms API, but the code generates HTML and javascript that runs in a
> thin AJAX client on the browser side.
>
> The problem I see is that it doesn't work in firefox, only IE.
>
> I've been thinking about AJAX a lot lately and I'm starting to think that
> an AJAX Desktop might be the development platform of the near future.
>
> It looks like the Visual WebGUI folks agree, but I think the goal might be
> better achieved by an open source group. (supporting a broad range of
> browsers rather than just IE.)
>
> Sounds like a massive amount of work. And I'm not sure if it would be
> better to recode an existing API or create a new, simpler API. But the
> obvious advantage to using WinForms, assuming a group of programmers could
> pull it off, would be that it is already a widespread and widely used API
> in the industry.
>
> I'm probably smoking something.
>
> What do you guys think?