How distributed mobile computing resembles a JIT compiler

The Just In Time (JIT) compiler used in the Java Virtual Machines (JVM) is the tool responsible to compile Java bytecode into native platform code, thus granting the application improved execution speed on certain operations.





How can this be comparable to distributed mobile computing? Like I stated in previous posts, I intend to be able to migrate code that is currently being executed into other machines, and resume it's execution there. Let's analyze what this means from the client application's point of view:

1. The client is viewing a page that accesses a procedure that is currently being executed on the server. Thus it calls it with a call (possibly an asynchronous one) to the server, and sets a callback function to receive the server answer;
2. The server opts to send that computation to the client, so it does so (let's assume for now that it uses a Termite-like approach to do so);
3. The client has now the task of storing the received computation is some JavaScript callable form, so that it can call it directly instead of using the RPC and callback he used before.

To do this, he changes the way he calls a given functionality. Which is pretty much the same thing the JIT compiler does. The JVM stores a couple of Virtual Tables (V-Tables) with the addresses of every functions. In the first, it stores pointers to the source code, while the second stores pointers to byte-compiled functions. The first times the code is called, the JVM uses the first V-Table, but calls the JIT to make the compilation and fill in the address in the second V-Table. This way, subsequent calls to the functions will be directed to the byte-compiled file, directly, in a transparent way for the application code.



This can be used as an inspiration for code mobility: Both the client and the server may store tables for each procedure that may be subject to migration, associated with the local address or the particular remote call mechanism, along with a flag that states which method is used currently. The problem still is what information is relevant for each function execution. This single table would suffice if we wanted static code migration. But if we want to migrate running code, we have to consider every function that can be used within the running code.



This topic is still fresh, and I will have to do some experimentations before I can have a more conclusive opinion. But I have a good feeling about this mechanism when associated with a Termite-like code migration technique!

Inria's Hop

I finally got to read both technical papers on Hop (found in Hop Home page), and I can now make a reasonable comparison between their approach and Termite's.



First let's describe Hop's in a few sentences. Being aimed at Web applications development, Hop is mainly a programming language that separates the application logic from the interface definition, while maintaining a single coding artifact for the application. The language is built upon Bigloo Scheme, so that servers may import several useful libraries. The core features of Hop are:

• server services - defined just like a regular function, with the macro 'define-service', can do basically anything on the server.
• interface - created with macros that resemble the HTML tags, interfaces are a declaratively constructed HTML tree. They can contain scripts with Scheme code of two different natures:
  
  
• Client-side code, translated automatically from to JavaScript;
• Server-side code, mixed within client-side scripts but prefixed with a special character. This code is translated to the appropriate asynchronous server calls, and every exchanged object is automatically mangled/de-mangled (JSON can be used to read server responses on the client).

One of the things that pops out when you see a Hop application is it's elegance, as everything is written in a single file using the same programming language, despite addressing the two important application "strata" (server logic and user interface). The continuous bidirectional communication (and data exchange) between the client and servers is accomplished via asynchronous remote function calls to the server and by setting events on the client that are triggered upon a server's reply - enabling both push and pull communication models.



Another interesting fact is the execution model Hop uses. It is based on several engines running for a single application: One for the UI processing, and other(s) to the application logic. The URL start-point loads the UI engine, and henceforth it is responsible for calling other engines as other functionality is needed.



But Hop isn't perfect. Let's take a closer look at the service model. As it is, Hop creates an URL for each server call needed in the UI strata. Each URL is stored in a server-side table, that is never cleansed - even temporary URL's used for anonymous services are kept indefinitely. This could be resolved (as the authors briefly point out) by exchanging closures (both the server function identifier and all the necessary variables in the environment) with the client.



By now, we can understand another weakness of Hop. Hop uses SCM2JS, which translates Scheme code into JavaScript and allows both languages to work seamlessly within the same memory space. However, as technically close as the languages may be, the translation fails in some key aspects, such as the Scheme support for continuations. The authors state that this could be done whether by the use of trampolines or by the translation into Continuation Passing Style (as specified by Henry Baker's paper), but would always create performance penalties. However, with support for continuations, Hop could easily get all Termite's mobile code functionality, like replication or execution migration between processes.



In my opinion, even if Hop can do such code migration with continuations, it's still weaker than Termite, as it's goals are (currently) too low. They want to build simple Web applications based on interactive operations. They wouldn't be able to build a peer-to-peer application with a Web Interface using code migration between clients, as the concept of client is mangled in the Scheme code as being the UI strata. Termite's approach, on the other hand, clearly considers processes, and that seems to make sense to me, as both clients and servers can currently play the same roles, with bidirectional client-server communication.



Before I wrap-up this Hop analysis, it's relevant to point out other weaknesses of the SCM2JS:

• exact Scheme numbers are currently mapped to floating-point JavaScript numbers;
• Errors in Scheme are not necessarily errors in JavaScript, as the translation leaves erroneous Scheme code in executable JavaScript code (like the concatenation of two objects, (+ "a" 2) is translated to "a"+2, which yields "a2" and not an error);
• features like call/cc and eval constructs are not translatable, yet.
  
  

I hope Hop evolves into a great tool. Also, Bigloo Scheme, as well as Hop, need to be executable on Windows boxes, to gain the deserved popularity!

Disconnected browsing

One of my current activities' main goals is to produce the necessary infrastructure for a web application to be used offline. While the term disconnected browsing is becoming obsolete - Web applications now offer users a decent graphical (web) interface, not a bunch of HTML documents interlinked in a browseable manner - I'll stick with this denomination for the time being, until a better one comes arround. My research for now has been centered on the first Web architecture, the browseable type. Even so, up until 1997 there's not much public research on this matter, and the material I've found isn't what I'm looking for. In Web Intelligent Query - Disconnected Web Browsing using Cooperative Techniques - Kavasseri, Keating, Wittman, Joshi, Weerawarana (ResearchIndex) - it's clear that even then the Web model wasn't appropriate for disconnected browsing. They identified that, in order to browse the Internet, one would have to:

• Know a set of known starting points;
• Have a constant network connection;
• Filter lots of useless information;
• Put up with bandwidth shortage and frequent link faillures (mainly with mobile devices, but also by elected network disruption, e.g. for battery power saving).

The authors state right from the beggining that the proposed solution targets static Web information. I know, this makes this solution useless for today's Web model, but I wanted to read on, just to check if there was some valuable idea. But they propose an architecture based on an "intelligent" proxy, one that stands between the browser and the Web, and is responsible for making both IR (Information Retrieval), based on users requests and IG (Information Gathering), based on guessed pro-actively retrieval of information (Cooperative Information Gathering: A Distributed Problem Solving Approach - Oates, Prasad, Lesser (ResearchIndex)). They have some interesting related work, but the one that caught my eye was a paper on usage patterns detection, for production of browsing related tasks automations (Integrating Bottom-Up and Top-Down Analysis For Intelligent Hypertext - James, Margaret, Recker (ResearchIndex)). The concept of disconnected browsing for them demands a very strict flow, from the user (client) standpoint:

1. The client requests a set of information;
2. The proxy makes its magic, fetches data from the web - it is permanently online! - and processes the request;
3. The client asks for the fetched results;
4. The client processes the information;
5. The client sends feedback to the proxy.

During this steps, the authors consider that being offline during steps 2 and 4 grants the client the designation of a disconnected browser... I intend to shed some light of the concept of disconnected execution of Web applications. This has lots of non-trivial obstacles, like

• the existence of dynamic information;
• the concurrent access to mutable, persistent server-side information;
• the nature of the graphical interface being no longer a single (nor static) HTML page.

The usage model is also diffente, as the client must pre-fetch some portion of application and data, and then must be able to go offline and play arround with it. After he comes up online, the application must somehow synchronize his changed information with the server's - which, by the way, may envolve complex conflict resolution and/or merge rules for specific information types. From this paper, however, there are some good contributions to my project:

• Disconnected information becomes much smaller if we know a priori what to download. So it would be a good idea to detect what the user commonly does, his usage patterns!
• It may be usefull to have a separate agent responsible to fetch the application code/data to be downloaded to the client. As this can be computationally heavy task, having the web server do it may cause serious performance issues.

Right now I'll keep looking for other disconnected Web usage papers and projects - I'd like to see something recent, at least not older than 5 years! I know that when I reach Coda's documentation, I'll be too far from the model I want, but eventually I'll have to get down to it, as it has some good, well documented merging techniques.

Concurrency in a web platform with distributed computing

Right now, it's clear whatever platform is to be the key for a Web application success, it must be based on a client-server architecture, something with the look and feel of the so-called Web 2.0 applications. That is, I want to use a Web platform to implement the aplication GUI, just as if it was a desktop application.



Wrt. the concurrency model, I would like to have multiple clients accessing simultaneously to the same application. Off course faillures on certain nodes (either clients or servers) must also be considered. Lastly, I want to be able to make computations on both the client and the server side.



Without having a Web architecture, I can find three approaches to the concurrency aspect:

1. Shared space: By using a memory space shared by all interested nodes, one can make applications by building (complex) contraptions with locks and semaphores. It's tedious, error-prone, and is generaly considered to be avoided in medium-large applications.
2. Message passing: Using the Actors approach in which everything is an object that is operated solely by exchanging messages with it. Most of the times this is simplified to the model where only processes (or nodes, or threads) send messages to each other (like Erlang)
   
   
3. Declarative data flow: this is the model used by Termite, and I've described it extensively in the previous post. In short each process can send messages, data, and execution-flow to another process.

From these three, the third seems to solve more issues:

• Doesn't need the coding complexity needed in the shared data management;
• Does not demand separate programming of paralel processes;
• Declarative DSL's save lots of code lines, with abstractions based on continuations replication between nodes

With the Web architecture in mind, we must consider at least the following questions:

• How are computations going to be transferred to a given client or back to the server?
• How will the computation be transferred at any point of the application execution?
  
  
• Given the bandwidth current limitations, how are computations going to be serializable? In processes, continuations, closures? What is the relevant minimal data set that need to be passed along the wire?
• It is a fact that the client must have an engine (in ECMA Script, I suppose) to process some part of the application - either the user interface or the domain application logic. This engine must be prepared to receive this sort of computations from other nodes (as well as to send some back to them).

This questions are good guides to the next stage of my research. I'll make sure to post the answers I (hopefully) find.

Termite - the light at the end of the tunnel?

Last month I started looking at Termite, a Scheme-like language to produce concurrent and parallel programs. It's now time to make the relevant comments, based on the paper (read it here) and directed to my PhD purpose - Webapps Interfaces development in the Web 2.0 new world.



The first thing worth making clear is the concept of distributed computations. These are concurrent programs (lightweight processes), potentially physically isolated. The data transfer between each process is made via message passing. This is based on the Actors approach, and can also be verified in Erlang. This model carries the burden of the need of functionality on the programs code. In other words, mutation cannot be done in Termite. Fortunatelly, it is possible to emulate the same behaviour by representing the "mutable" state in a process, and using a message dispatch mechanism (and representing an object in a separate process).



Processes are isolated, even if they are on the same physical node. This makes the concurrent model quite simple, as there is no shared memory, no mutexes to handle and, additionally, there is no need of a distributed garbage collector!



The message sending is done using a single mailbox per process, with assynchronous sending (the send and pray model!) and synchronous receiving. Also, Termite assumes that connections cannot be trusted as being reliable, thus assuming the possibility of failure. Since there is no message delivery guarantees, there also are no correct order of reception guarantees. Termite leaves the burden of dealing with this to the application code, by using timeouts mechanisms. Luckilly, Termite has a way of propagating exceptions between two related processes, using Erlang-like bi-directional links, but also using a one-way-only link between two processes. Finally, Termite supports tags in each sent messsage, thus being able to mimic a multiple-channel model in a single-channel architecture. This tag system can also be used in the timeout message detection system!



One interesting aspect is the worarround to make every object serializable. Non-serializable objects are proxied by using a process to represent them, so e.g., each port can be serialized using only a PID! This means we can send a message to the screen, or receive a message from an input device, which gives us a great sense of liberty on our programs!



When comparing to Erlang, aside from the Lisp-like syntax and the one-way links between processes, Termite also provides support for first class serializable continuations.

The related work also indicates that Kali uses a lazy closure code transmition between processes, along with a cache system, that could help improve the code!



After reading this, there are a couple of questions to ask about Termite: What does it take to build a web framework using this kind of comunicating processes, and what's missing to be able to fulfill my PhD requirements.

The first question is answered in the Termite paper, by Dynamite. Unfortunatelly, I wasn't able to find any proper documentarion/web page/binaries/other material related to it.



So let's talk about what Termite can do for me, and what it can't do. If we want to use the comunicating processes model, we can envision a client being a process that sends messages to a given node on the server. This node can be connected to others, making server replication a trivial task to do (the Termite paper illustrates this behaviour). I would like to have reliability on the message sending, so this would have to be added as a layer to the Termite framework, using some sort of timeout detection. I would also like to know that the delivery order is respected in every message, so that should also be granted at the message-sending protocol level, as well. Let's say that this would be enough, for now (and leave "minor" details like scalability and speed behind!). Since we can propagate messages between Termite processes, the trivial way to achieve this would be to integrate a Termite engine within a JavaScript client-engine. I can think of a couple of ways to do this. The first is simply to implement the Termite (and all of the Gambit-C dependencies) in Javascript. The other is to analyse the messages that need to be sent through processes, and produce a platform independent protocol (at least, to enable a JavaScript client to talk to a Termite one :) )



I know this is still a bit hard to achieve, and I should look into other approaches before trying this. But just imagine being able for a server to start by making all of the application computation. Then, as the server machine decides it is fed-up, or if it is simply bloated, then it spawns another server in a neighbour node, and transfers the computation to it. Also imagine a more complex load-balancing mechanism being implemented between the servers. It's all very interesting (I guess this is what should be being done in the Dynamite project!), but I must confess the fun part is between clients and servers. The server finds out, after a while, that the client is able to do some processing, and it transfers a continuation with the job to be done on the client-side. Since each process can update the running code during its execution, this would be easily achieved. Now the sky is the limit, since not only we can have code execution being swaped from the client to and from the server, but we also can envision collaboration between clients, without any kind of server interaction! If this isn't enough, lets remember that the communication is reliable. Oh, and that by now we already have a fault-tolerant (replicated) server system! We could even imagine a client being able to detach itself from its server, going offline, keep on working and then synchronizing with any server when it gets back online. The implications on these kind of scenarious are a bit different than the message passing model, as we need to consider the domain structure of the application, access control, the ammount of data the client needs to own in its machine to operate, among other important issues.



Sorry for the long post. I guess If you got this far, you might as well have some opinion on this matter, so please, leave a comment!



Ta ta...

Lisp Interpreter in JavaScript

After checking out this JavaScript file, and another similar approaches, I found out that this is not exactly what I was looking for. Here's what I have in mind, for a virtual machine on the client-side:

• I need it to run code specifically designed to it. (Right now, anything must do, but I need it to be able to translate it to valid client actions - aka, use something like JavaScript, DOM, CSS, etc, etc.
• I need it to be modified from the server (i.e., to upload code changes)
• I need to have some sort of support for a set of language constructs and basic types, including continuations. So I probably need to serialize everything.
• I need to consider the drawbacks of maintaining all of the variables in the continuation's environment. One simple closure may be small, but the full environment - needed to make good use of dynamic variables - can become quite large. Note that some tests are in order to make this assert valid!

The downside of the Lisp Interpreter I checked is that everything is automatically translated to a Javascript object. That's not what I need, since I need the code to be able to travel back into the server. I only need it to be evaluated on JavaScript. (This also means I can use a portion of this code, like the tokenizer and/or parser!)



More to come...

The Law of Notepad

Taken from Continuing Intermittent Incoherency blog:

The Law of Notepad: if creative people can’t make something awesome using the lamest of production tools, your platform is gonna loose.

OpenAjax Hub

Here is a quote from Coach's blog, related to the main challanges that OpenAjax is trying to address to get interoperability:



coachwei.com :: OpenAjax Update - Addressing Key Challenges for Ajax Adoption :

• # Toolkit “loading and unloading”(the capability to load and unload more than one Ajax toolkits into one page): For example, right now a lot of toolkits overload the “onload” function, which will certainly cause collision with another toolkit;
  
  
• # Name collision (the capability to deal with variable and function name collision). For example, quite a few Ajax toolkits today use “$” as a function name. When they are all loaded onto the same page, what happens?
  
  
• # Event Hub (The capability to have interaction between different Ajax toolkits). The key requirement here is to enable some kind of “event” propagation so that an event generated from toolkit A can be processed by toolkit B. An example is that the user drags an item from Toolkit A and drops it on Toolkit B – how should this two toolkits communicate the information related to this event? The proper solution is to provide a common event hub that each Ajax toolkit can publish and subscribe events. Initially, we do not have to define the details of different event objects, which can be defined in the future.
  
  
• # Markup scanning (the capability for an Ajax toolkit to scan an HTML document to pick up the interested markup segments for processing): many Ajax toolkits allow the usage of markup to define components within an HTML page but they all have their own mechanism of scanning the document. If more than one toolkit is loaded, the HTML document maybe scanned multiple times with the danger of causing significant inefficiency and collision. Providing a common mechanism to scan an HTML document would solve this problem.
  
  
• # Network Hub (server connectivity management): most browsers allow only limited number of connections to the server (for example, Internet Explorer allows only two). If each Ajax toolkit uses its own mechanism to handle server connectivity, it is highly likely collision will happen if more than one Ajax toolkits are loaded on the same page. A proper solution is to provide a common mechanism that centrally manages server connectivity and serves all registered toolkits.;

Apart from this list, they point out other missing factors, but that shall not be addressed by OpenAJAX. They are performance issues, the multiple toolkit bloating problem, whether there are security issues with AJAX, and if so, how do they die. Other interesting problems arise with mobility and offline execution of AJAX-based code, as well as with application development and maintenance.



These last two are particularly interesting to my work. The mentioned post talks about a blog with mobility issues: SitePen Blog » mobile.

HTTP is dead. All hail Web Messaging Protocols!

It has become very clear that HTTP doesn't serve current Web needs and purposes. So why does it remains the sole winner of the communication protocol in the Web? This is simple, really. Every browser knows how to speak HTTP, and since it's a pretty simple protocol, nobody seems eager to move a multitude of users into a paradigm shift.



The tough question is related to the solution, instead of being centered on the problem space. Where do we go from HTTP? What do we need? Most aplpications today are struggling to find a proper way to communicate with the server. Comet strategies provide bi-directional messaging between a client and a server. Internet Messaging Bus goes a step further, granting the following properties to the communication protocol:

• Guaranteed message delivery
• Guaranteed order of delivery
• Once and only once delivery
• Both client pull and server push data fetching models.
  
  

This seems to be the end of the AJAX hype, as it is know. That is, the XMLHttpRequest, by itself, doesn't grant all those nice things to any WebApp. However, the word seems to be catchy, and people seem to want to stick with it for a bit longer, and the current bet is a messaging protocol.



See:

• XmlHttpRequest BAD - Messaging GOOD - Greg's blog
• Comet: Low Latency Data for the Browser
• Web 2.0 Communication Layer: from HTTP to Comet to Internet Mess
• coachwei.com :: Web 2.0 Communication Layer: from HTTP to Comet to Internet Messaging Bus
• OpenAjax Alliance White Paper

Process execution mode swapping

Another aspect that is relevant for my PhD is the exchange of information between the client(s) and the server(s). To make a pictorical description, imagine a situation where a client walks into a web application, which is running entirely on the server. The server then sends some of the computations to be executed on the client, e.g., for performance reasons. After a while, the client may take too long to execute a certain computation and transfers it, along with the already processed information, back to the server.



This situation can be compared to the Java Bytecode execution done by the Just In time compiler. The VM starts by interpreting code, then after a few iterations, it boosts up the compiler and the code that was being called is now fetched from a compiled source.



What I mean to inspect is if I can take some of these ideas and port them into a Web architecture.



In SISC - Documentation, we can see that the Scheme interpreter can also run byte-compiled Java code. I must now find out how does it swap the execution context between those two modes, and what considerations are being done.

Interpreters in JavaScript

Before discussing Termite (it deserves a post for itself), I'll post a series of links to attempts to write language interpreters in JavaScript.



First, the motivation: As I need to create a framework to build web applications with certain characteristics built-in the client-server communication infrastructure, I need to do constant experimentations with the client capabilities. Considering that the majority of clients are able to run a javascript interpreter within the browser, it seems to be the best bet, for compatibility sakes.



A list of links to different approaches follows. For some pages, The only interesting reading material is on the Javascript that is embbeded in the source html code, so you have to dig into that.

• Interactive Scheme (see http://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/jscm/scm.js.txt)
  
  
• Lisp Interpreter in JavaScript
  
  
• A Brainfuck interpreter in JavaScript
• The Little JavaScripter and the Little Scheme
• Joe Ganley's Lisp in JavaScript
  
  

Conclusions on whether this will or will not be usefull may come up on future posts!

A Common Lisp Post

This is my first post sent via my Common Lisp Atom interface. It uses the JLinker to call the Java Google client API methods.

Termite - concurrent and parallel programming in Lisp

This is a simple tutorial for Termite, made by its author:



Bill Clementson's Blog: Update on Termite (A Lisp for Concurrent/Parallel Programming)





After reading the paper on it I'll make a proper review, but I like the side remark on a file upload procedure definition:

this program has about the same number of lines of code as a minimal "hello world" program in Java.

Google Web Toolkit experiences

I just started toying arround with GWT (Google Web Toolkit). Here's my thoughts so far:

• [GOOD THING] It makes the building and running on the development environment simple. It doesn't offer the flexibility of a running interpreter, but it provides two commands (scripts), one for compiling and another for running a box (development shell) that is an application container (tomcat based) with a small browser for a quick test.
• [GOOD THING] An application has to import only a couple of jar's to run
• [BAD THING] We have the old Template Model problem. We have two source folder structures, one "client" with the java files, and a "public" with the html templates, images, CSS, and other files to be published directly. The HTML templates should contain id's called "slot1", "slot2", and so on, for each object that is placed with Java to be attached to a certain place in the template... Is this horrible or what? The good thing is that google also lets us do (almost) everything without a template, creating defaults!
• [BAD THING] I just noticed something weird in the demo application, the KitchenSink. a page with a floating dialog box, that warns with the following:

"If you're wondering why there's a list box at the bottom, it's to demonstrate that you can drag the dialog box over it. This is noteworthy because some browsers render lists and combos in a funky way that, if GWT didn't do some magic for you, would normally cause the dialog box to appear to hover underneath the list box. Fortunately, you don't have to worry about it -- just use the GWT DialogBox class." Now this is (1) weird, as it seems we're still dealing with black-magic in order for things to appear right on the screen, and (2) wrong, as the google shell browser still shows the listbox over the dialog box, if we drag it towards the right (oddly enough, a left drag runs ok...)

powered by performancing firefox

After having some meetings about the future of my ...

After having some meetings about the future of my research in the ESW group (at INESC-ID), I've set a few goals to my PhD. I'm now a part of a project that will integrate a workflow management system into a Web Application development methodology. My contribution is centered on the following RIA features:

• Easy rich content development on a web application
• Disconnected browsing, used to enable specific parts of the workflow to be worked on without requiring a permanent Internet link.

The second point is my main goal, as the first is being more and more common every day (do a google search for 'AJAX' and check it out!). To achieve disconnected browsing, one of the biggest challanges is to find out what is going to be the persistency model - given that the information is always shared and interacted with between two possibly remote machines.

Some questions to be answered:

• What is the minimum ammount of information needed in the client for it to be able to execute operations offline?
• What are the security issued underlying such an information sharing?
• How can workflow activities be moduled so that they can be run isolated from the rest?
  

Here is a summary of the activities I fullfilled i...

Here is a summary of the activities I fullfilled in my PhD, during this year:

• Curricular Courses: I have completed the curricular component of my PhD, with the following courses:
• • Formal Software Development: Based on the B-Method, this course was about the development methodologies with the help of formal specifications;
  • Advanced Topics: I studied the Desktop applications interfaces development tools, their types and characteristics. I also read Jenifer Tidwell's "Designing Interfaces" book.
• Research:
• • I made a study on remote desktop interactions, where I calculated the required ammount of network bandwidth to enable common user interactions to be executed in remote applications, such as mouse moves and clicks, or key presses. The conclusions were satisfatory, as today it is possible to enable complex interactions over the web, even if they are mapped as a set of basic - and non-optimized - operations.
  • I analised several tools that help the development of Rich Internet Applications (or RIAs).

AJAX and Accessibility - Standards-schmandards

I read an article from March the 1st of this year, on AJAX and usability. It's a nice, simple, straight article, easy readable.It also has a few references to other articles explaining blogs (as well as a long comment list!). Here's the main points of the author on usability: "Improving accessibility of AJAX forms Fortunately there are some things we can do to increase accessbility of AJAX forms. Here are my recommendations: 1. Inform the user at the top of the form that it requires javascript or detect javascript automatically and warn the user when it isn't available. If the form has many fields you will spare your users a lot of frustration. Everyone hates filling out a form just to find out that they can't submit it. 2. Inform the user that the page is updated dynamically. This is especially important for screen reader users and will help them decide when to trigger a re-read of the page. 3. Make it possible to recieve an alert when information was updated. This may not be practically possible depending on the complexity of your form but will help a screen reader user a lot. Alert boxes are read by the screen reader and are usually displayed together with a sound. The checkbox should be displayed so it is clear that it is not part of the original form. 4. Highlight recently updated areas for a short period of time. This will help sighted users understand what just happened. The nice folks over at 37signals have dubbed this 'The Yellow Fade Technique' but you can use any colour you like. Check out Adam Michela's code for another way of providing the fade."

Morfik - the Javascript synthetizer

I've recently found an interesting, promising work, another framework for Web Applications development. So what's different in this one?

Taking Morfik's CTO's words, ?Morfik has developed a unique JavaScript Synthesis Technology (?JST?) that allows developers to use a powerful integrated design environment together with a high-level language of their choice to create reliable applications comprised purely of HTML and JavaScript?.

Since the framework isn't open-source (so far, at least) all we can checkout is the two Flash demos on using the program to develop basic applications, and a few white papers and communications they release to the public. From these, I'm able to comment on both their mission and the program itself.

Morfik's main goal is to take jobs away for "rocket-scientists" who want to develop software for well-paying companies. So far, the so-called AJAX applications have been hard to implement, given both client and server's side complexity. Morfik allows these applications to be coded in a familiar language (one of several clones of popular languages like Pascal, Basic or C#), just like a common desktop application. This code will be trans-compiled into a server side application and a set of HTML and JavaScript files to be loaded in the client's browser. Hence, no web application or AJAX knowledge would be necessary.

From the demonstrations, I've spotted that the greatest feature of Morfik it's its familiarity with common Microsoft applications to develop the application. For example, a specific Morfik component is used to setup the domain tier, using an interface almost 100% identical to Microsoft Access'. Similarly, the web pages are designed using a WYSIWYG program, just like Visual Studio's interface builder. So any application used to the Microsoft's tools should be fairly suited to use Morfik without a two year-long course!

How does this Morfik advent leaves me? Well, I was planning to do something similar for my PhD, so now I must find out exactly what they plan to do, so my work won't clash with theirs. For instance, I'd like to know how do they split the computations between the client and the server - I'd like to give some adaptability to the server.

To add up, Morfik have a pioneers program, but they haven't released any usable version of the program for us to test it (not even demo-ware...). I'll just wait for further news on their site: http://www.morfik.com/

New directions, new homepage

I've just reviewed my homepages, and it took me a while to get them
presentable... So here's my status, online-wise:

- I have http://360.yahoo.com/edy_in_carpathia - this is my personal website,
with access to photo albums, preferences and other non-interesting stuff :)
- My work homepage is http://edgargoncalves.no-ip.org - it has a set of projects I'm working on, and my professional information (like my resume)
- This site (last, but not least) will be my communication point, unless Yahoo releases a great API to post messages to it's blog. So, for now on, my PhD discoveries, researches and interesting notes will be posted here, for the world to see. Ocasionally one or other photo will invade this space, but I promise I won't have the motivation to do so (nor the time!)

So, on my next post, I promise to write about remote interfaces, my last research subject for the past weeks.

Ta-ta...

The Vitruvian Man. Leonardo's most perfect piece, imho. This is also to tell that this blog isn't dead. In fact, it's sibling MSN Space has recently entered in a inevitable coma... But bear in mind that I have my own tech blog at www.esw.inesc-id.pt/~eemg/ - so this blog will be ONLY for personal/relevant photos and thoughts. why? because I have Hello. and because It grants me unlimited picture storage and a nice interface! :) So sit back, and enjoy the show...
Posted by Hello