Re: [Gmod-ajax] AJAX GBrowse poster feedback from RECOMB

[Steve T. <st...@mo...>]

Hi,

> On Mon, 2007-04-23 at 13:28 -0700, Ian Holmes wrote:
> 
>>>learned if there's a good reason for it.  But why not Java applets?
>>>The only two reasons we came up with are (1) long load time, and (2)
>>>need to install Java, but that's not hard...
>>
>>Interesting. I'd like to know what others think of this.
> 
> 
> I can think of a few!
> 
> I've done stuff before with Java applets as web 2.0 type thingys, and my
> recollection is that it was very nasty. One still vivid nasty part is
> that there was no good way to have the Java applet and JavaScript
> communicate with each other, thereby trapping what you're doing on one
> side or the other. There were classes and objects to get around this,
> but the implementations were buggy and platform dependent (LiveConnect,
> etc.).
> 
> Another big ding against applets was presentation/layout issues. For
> example, font resizing and layout won't work with the rest of the
> browser, making styles very hard to use and control. Also, printing just
> gave me some truncation and looked pretty bad when I tried it with an
> applet from Sun's Java site (the spreadsheet applet) and cut-and-paste
> didn't work at all. Scraping data would also be impossible.
> 
> It's hard to just stick with the tangibles: things were very...fiddly.
> It may have all changed since I last did this years ago, but doing a
> cursory google search right now it looks to be in more or less the same
> state as I remember. 
> 
> It's  hard to have the browser as a platform when it's actually Java.
> 

Haven't posted for a while, but I just thought I would say well done to getting AJAX GBrowse this far. It just gets better and better!

I absolutely agree with all these comments. I hate the language wars that seem to accompany certain discussions in bioinformatics. At the end of the day, users want functionality and I have seen
far too many projects go down the 'we must rewrite it in Java' route to know that gains can be slight/non-existent for a massive amount of recoding. Applets are often slow to load and run (let's not 
forget some biologists still have older machines out there). There are some good small applets out there but developers who can program fast and nice looking applets I would say are few and far 
between. The fact is you can get considerable bang for your buck with the latest web technologies - providing a great user experience and allowing developers to code in what they want to at the back end.

Keep up the good work - in the language of your choice!

Steve
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Medical Sciences Division
Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine/Sir William Dunn School
Oxford University