

Pushing Data, Not Pages is the New Model for Application Development - jamest
http://devopsangle.com/2012/04/25/pushing-data-not-pages-is-the-new-model-for-application-development/

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PeterisP
It's the same old client-server model as it used to be done in 1990'ies. The
article feels quite wrong with it's claim "The old client-server model
involved doing most of the work on the server side and then piping the results
down to a dumb client." - that's not client-server model; client-server
development model involves smart clients which we abandoned in the last decade
because of concerns about portability, installation problems and version
update management. And now the cycle completes once more...

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klint
These new tools are fairly different from the client-server applications of
the 90s (and 00s and even now). Those desktop applications did have a lot of
chrome on the client side, but the "real work" was being done on the server.
Normal AJAX apps are more like those 90s apps - the UI lives in the client,
but they rely more heavily on the server than a CouchApp would.

That said, all these Meteor and Firebase apps could end up having quite a bit
of middleware and end up not seeming all that radical, depending on how much
stuff gets added on.

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rhizome
You're right that they're different, but I think they probably use the same CS
concepts, which is why we keep seeing the see-saw between thick and thin
clients. Keep in mind that the thin-client trend that we saw in the
late-90s/early 2000s was driven by Sun, who was selling a ton of big iron in
those days (you weren't serious if you didn't have an E4K), not because there
was some grand new technology that required them for functionality or
usability.

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tlrobinson
_"a design philosophy of sending data to apps, not rendered pages"_

I think we need to invent a term for this. How about "AJAX"?

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mikek
You can have AJAX without data. HTML can be AJAXed too.

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olalonde
I feel somewhat excited about that. It means we're getting closer and closer
to Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a "semantic web":

"I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing
all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people
and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to
emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and
our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The
‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize."

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pippc
I don't see this trend picking up beyond the scope of web applications for
some time due to one simple problem: search engines. A large amount of content
on the web is still meant to be openly consumed and found, and until search
engines are able to run the resultant JS to generate the page, any sort of
content-generating website will need to be able to render the pages as HTML.
This client-heavy paradigm fits perfectly for "applications", but for now I
don't think it can pervade elsewhere--unless someone's come up with a solution
to this I'm unaware of.

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tlack
Even when Googlebot becomes Chrome, I don't know how it will make sense of the
Ajax content fragments and component-based UIs. I think in the short term most
people are simply going to build their sites twice: once as a JS-heavy
interactive app and again as a bare bones HTML app that will index well.

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brlewis
I agree with the "Pushing Data" part and disagree with the "Not Pages". An
important "dumb client" still exists: the CDN. I think a popular model in the
near future will be to push server-rendered HTML to a CDN, along with
JavaScript that the ultimate client uses to get whatever has changed since
that HTML was rendered.

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klint
Right - it's not that no pages are going to be rendered and transmitted.
You've obviously got to get the HTML/CSS/JS into your browser somehow. There's
also going to be a certain amount of heavy lifting that will keeping happening
server side - big data analytics and all that.

But the trend is towards doing less rendering server side and more on the
client side, with just the raw data being pushed around rather than the
presentation of that data.

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bitwize
That thing on the page scares me. Is that what Missingno. would really look
like?

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tzm
It's not the "same old client/server model" from legacy systems. Essentially
it's a publishing model that embraces mobile, cloud and in-memory data
computation. ie, real-time data sync and the democratization of data analysis.

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klint
Actually, there is one old model that this new model does remind me of: IMAP
(and Exchange as well). The e-mail client caches local data, can operate
offline and interacts with one server that synchronizes data across multiple
clients.

