Ideas for a brand new widget toolkit

[Joakim]

On Tuesday, 13 August 2013 at 21:05:21 UTC, Craig Dillabaugh 
wrote:
> 1. Could it not work for offine GUIs, assuming the server and
> client
> were on the same machine, in which case one would hope the
> latency is
> low.  For example X11 works locally without a network 
> connection.
Yes, you could put the server on the user's desktop, then drive 
the GUI runtime locally.  But this could raise a host of issues 
with portability and capability, which you see with webapps that 
try this offline model today.  You'd need to make sure that the 
Apache server and your oddball-cool Erlang webapp can run on the 
user's Windows desktop, that they won't fry his Celeron with all 
the stuff you can do easily on your Xeon server.

But yeah, if you kept the server-side lean and portable, you 
could go offline this way, and I imagined that something like 
this would be the solution for offline use eventually.

> 2. Based on your "I wonder if offline is a niche ...." I get the
> impression you live in a part of the world that has more 
> reliable
> internet access than where I am from :o)
Actually no, which is why I have multiple redundant internet 
connections at my place, only one of which is connected right 
now. ;) But offline apps are increasingly fading away: most 
people spend most of their time these days using apps that are 
constantly connected to the internet, whether email or webapps.

I'm offering an idea for a specialized solution that optimizes 
that common connected use case, rather than a general solution 
that is more work for the programmer, forcing him to write more 
low-level networking and GUI synchronization code on his own.  
That's the tack the web takes, I'm following in that vein with a 
different approach.  I'm not trying to say offline apps aren't an 
important use case; I'm just saying there can be other GUI 
toolkits to handle mostly-offline apps for now.