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Oct 13

SWeb 3.0: Paul Hammant goes from Thicky to Swiby

Groovy, Java, Ruby, Tech Add comments

Paul Hammant has been involved in a ton of fantastic open source projects, and some cool toys too. Thicky was a toy that I would often show off when I was doing the Groovy thing. Building prototypes of Swing apps with a nice builder API was great.

Now he is having a bash on the web, and has written up his thoughts on SWeb 3.0 which gratuitously joins the Web 3.0 debate although it isn’t some drivel about how “Web 3.0 will include even MORE participation ….”.

Paul has joined up to make Swiby happen:

With Swiby the pages, should be shipped from the server side web frameworks like those today (Ruby on Rails, or Waffle), and executed in the browser via that plugin. All of these will be possible:

  • AJAX-like behavior
  • lazy loading of hidden tabs, or sections of a page
  • threaded / timed events
  • client side object storage more sophistcated that the current browser cookie
  • amazingly rich interfaces (YouTube, GMail, Writely should be easy to do)
  • equivalent of CSS for properties of widgets
  • server side decoration a la Sitemesh or PhpMesh
  • tiny pages, quick loading, and quick transitions from one page to another

The philosophy is that Swing has a nice component model and the cool side of the Web is the REST stuff, and a page centric world.

Paul is trying to take the best of both worlds to make it easier to build very rich apps on the Web platform.

It is a bold play, and is obviously an up hill battle against the incumbants, but I am all for more projects pushing the edges here, and I can’t wait to see more.

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