Posts by Pete

Tiscali bandwidth throttling flub fix flops

This is why we just switched

.. away from Tiscali (pretending to be Pipex) and over to PlusNet. Our service become appallingly bad, with many services being effectively unusable, from about November.

Web 2.0 and Tim O'Reilly as Marshal Tito

Thanks for a sane viewpoint

It's refreshing to read some logical analysis of "Web 2.0" (although couched in very hyperbolic language). Personally, I regard myself as an _engineer_ who works on state machines and distributed architectures. The whole AJAX business seems like nothing more or less than an attempt to work around the HTTP paradigm with smoke and mirrors; sure, it creates a better illusion than we currently have (and I'd rather use a "Web 2.0" interface than a "Web 1.0" one), but it doesn't address the real problems.

To give a concrete example - the Microsoft Atlas ^H^H^H^H^H AJAX for .NET framework is based around performing a normal request to the server, but doing so as a second thread^H^H^H^H^H^H an AJAX request. As such, the processing load on the server is increased, and the processing load on the client is also increased. It's likely (though I don't know and am open to correction) that other systems work in a similar way.

So - the actual effect is that UI content is rendered on the server, exactly as with "Web 1.0", but then the javascript on the browser munges the result into the current display. Pretty, but inefficient. Truly distributed systems necessarily have a concept of state at all points.

Frankly, I don't claim to know the answer; but I do think that Web 2.0 isn't it. From a UI perspective it's better than what we had, but from an engineering perspective it's a disaster.

Flames welcome...