
Rich Skrenta: AppEngine - Web Hypercard, finally - toffer
http://www.skrenta.com/2008/04/appengine_web_hypercard_finall.html
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meat-eater
For all its usefulness, where are those wonderful hypercard stacks now? That's
right you can't use them anymore or at least not that easily. This is due to
the fact that it's a proprietary platform that the vendor stopped supporting.

Although google's appengine is more open, a lot of its key components are
proprietary and can't be easily rebuilt. So while hypercard and appengine are
both wonderful technologies, I believe people should prefer something more
open. This allows you have an out in case google stops supporting appengine or
does something that prevents you from using it effectively.

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michaelneale
I violently agree. I am upset that others dont see this. Hypercard was great,
that that is totaly irrelevant now. Is everyone so short sighted and money
grubbing not to see it this time? Why do we have to repeat this over and over.

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marcus
But porting your GAE application to another provider is easy, it won't
automatically have the scaling capabilities and the Google login is a problem
but mostly they can be easily ported.

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michaelneale
yeah it appears doable, it doesn't appear to be googles intent to lock people
in (but then I am sure it wasn't the intent of hypercard either).

Its still up to the diligence of the people who write the app. The problem
with hypercard, was that the people using the app were the ones that created
the cool stuff, and the people maintaining hypercard wouldn't/couldn't keep it
going for them.

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marcus
Actually now that I think about it, because Google is now an OpenId provider,
you can probably just accept OpenIds when you port it out of GAE and
everything will work fine.

~~~
michaelneale
well that solves the least interesting problem at least ;)

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wallflower
Why hasn't Amazon made it easier to build web applications with EC2/S3?

I'm waiting for Amazon to respond with something similar. Just to get an
application up and running on Amazon seems to involve delving into message
boards (I have EC2/S3 accounts but it's learning how to port my web app is not
a priority at the moment)

The premise of EC2/S3 is that you can ask for services/CPU on demand - however
Google with AppEngine has significantly lowered the barrier to creating a
scalable web app (by handling scaling for you, once you write to their APIs
and give them your code [another issue]). Not everyone wants to be an Erlang
expert and roll their own scalable code.. (some people just want to be able to
build a cool popular app and outsource worries about scaling).

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bayareaguy
Is there anything significant Hypercard did that you can't do in flash these
days?

