by Barry Kukkuk
Is fat the new slim?
September 16, 2009 in News, releases by Barry Kukkuk
So they guy from Quirkey Blog created a new way to run web apps. It’s based on sammy.js. Sammy.js, in turn, is based on Sinatra. Sinatra is a very light weight web framework for Ruby. Sammy uses CouchDB for back-end storage.
The idea behind Sammys is that the web browser talks directly to the data store. It doesn’t have to go through a web server (or application server) to get things done. So all the routing is done in Javascript, in the browser.
It amuses me to see the industry vacillate between thick clients and thin clients. I mean in the beginning there was the thin client, with the mainframe as the server. Everything was good.
Then the PC revolution happened, and the thick client became fashionable. I think it happened because the wire protocols at the time could not handle the rich experience that the PC offered.
Then the Web 2.0 revolution happened, and we went back to thin clients. The browser was a fairly simple display front-end to the app that sat on the web servers.
But slowly the web browsers are becoming more and more powerful. With HTML 5 and ever faster Javascript engines, the browsers is becoming the new platform-independent GUI toolkit.
And once again we can do richer things in the browser than the wire protocal allows, so the client is becoming thick again.
So I guess in a few years time we’ll going thin client again. I wonder what the technology shift will be to make it happen?
