CLI on the Web

In the last few days Joe Hewitt has been lamenting the state of client side web development technologies on twitter. TechCrunch covered the progress in their The State Of Web Development Ripped Apart In 25 Tweets By One Man.

Today Joe followed up with a brilliant point:

   joehewitt: If CLI was the ECMA standard baked into browsers instead of ECMAScript we'd have a much more flexible web: http://bit.ly/sLILI

ECMA CLI would have given the web both strongly typed and loosely typed programming languages. It would have given developers a choice between performance and scriptability. A programming language choice (use the right tool for the right job) and would have in general made web pages faster just by moving performance sensitive code to strongly typed languages.

A wide variety of languages would have become first-class citizens on the web client. Today those languages can run, but they can run in plugin islands. They can run inside Flash or they can run inside Silverlight, but they are second class citizens: they run on separate VMs, and they are constrained on how they talk to the browser with very limited APIs (only some 20 or so entry points exist to integrate the browser with a plugin, and most advance interoperability scenarios require extensive hacks and knowing about a browser internal).

Perhaps the time has come to experiment embedding the ECMA CLI inside the browser. Not as a separate plugin, and not as a plugin island, but as a first-class VM inside the browser. Running side-by-side to the Javascript engine.

Read more: Miguel de Icaza's web log

Posted via email from jasper22's posterous