Submitted by The boys and girls of the Mozilla project have taken the wraps off the beta for Prism 1.0. Prism is a technology which blurs the boundaries between the web and the desktop, allowing you to approach web sites as if they were ordinary desktop applications. Prism is cross-platform, and runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
This beta release comes after lots of testing by not only the enthusiast community, but also by companies like Yahoo! Zimbra, DesignLinks International, and others. Based on this feedback, the team added new features and made some other improvements as well:
- New API functionality for allowing Prism-enabled web sites more desktop like power.
- Ability to set fonts, proxy settings and other application-speciï¬c settings.
- The ability to clear private data on demand.
- Applications are automatically updated when new Prism versions are available.
- Tray icon support, as well as submenus for dock and system tray menus.
- Full OS X 10.4 support, and further OS X specific enhancement.
- Support for SSL exceptions.
Mozilla says that with the release of the Prism 1.0 beta, they are ready to start working with web developers to make websites take advantage of Prism-specific features. “With the release of Prism 1.0 beta we are ready to start fostering an ecosystem that makes it easier for developers to create and distribute compelling web app bundles.” Mozilla’s Matthew Gertner writes.
You can download Prism 1.0 beta from the project’s web page.
How is this different from any other application server, e.g. WebObjects? Appears to me it is very similar, except with XUL instead of Java.
If this is the case, is XUL really a big win over Java? They’re both desktop-agnostic, and both bloated for the same reason …
This is very similar to other technologies that have existed for a while. For example, I contribute to Vexi:
http://vexi.sourceforge.net/
It has similar properties with 1 major difference; brand power. Mozilla brand is strong, and they have a large infrastructure (and as such many developers) behind them, whereas as most projects like Vexi suffer from being too loosely presented to the world – not because they’re not good or not well-featured, but because the final push (documentation, demos, marketing) takes a full time effort and we don’t have the manpower to do that.
Is Prism good? Probably. Anything special? I doubt it.
Well essentially, it bears absolutely no relation to them! :p
It’s a couple of things. It’s a tool for creating a link that will launch a browser for a particular site with custom settings for that site, and it’s a set of APIs that allow sites to interact with the desktop a little, like minimizing to the task tray, and creating a pop-up right-click menu for minimized apps.
I’m sure there’s some more to it but AFAICT that’s about it.
If the websites look at all “app-liked” rather than “website-like,” to do even what you describe you need some kind of HTTP-based control protocol (e.g., SOAP) and a portable runtime (in this case, XUL).
So with all this infrastructure, you might as well do more than simply having smart links and a few custom settings!
But they’re not app-like, they’re just websites in their own frame with some extra Firefox JS API for interfacing with some desktop functionality. This has nothing to do with XUL except that it uses xulrunner as essentially a low overhead container for Gecko.
You can of course create apps in XUL + JS, but that’s not what this is.
So, you could associate mailto: links with a web-email interface if you used such, and you can create links to those “web applications” (just some new fancy trend word for websites that fulfill a specific need), but haven’t you always been able to? I sure can create links to any website I wish just fine. And they are still just websites no matter how fancy frames you put them in.
Maybe I just am not part of the target group. I don’t use e-mail at all except if absolutely forced to, and I just can’t for the life of me imagine how you could turn MMO-Champion, OSNews or Slashdot to anything else than what it is: a website.
It’s mostly an easy interface to do such things and a few more as mentioned bij slight. Also read the other OSNews-article from today: “ODF, Net Apps, Netbooks Will Invigorate the OS Landscape”.
Personally I think they should just finish Prism and integrate it with Firefox so people will actually start using it.
Very much lacking polish, poor UI. It blurs the icons it creates from the favicons, which looks a mess. Google Chrome’s ‘web application’ tool does everything Prism does so much better. Honestly, Mozilla need to try harder with this one.
It doesn’t blur them, favicons are small and bitmap based, there’s no way to magically make them sharp if you scale them up.
What does Chrome do better specifically?
* Chrome upscales the favicon so that it shows as sharp pixel art, rather than a big blur.
* Chrome’s context menu has many more practical options on it, for navigating and moving to a full browser window
* Chrome’s titlebar is smaller
* Overall easier to use, and built in.
This whole “web application” trend really is a bad egg in my opinion.
The last thing we need is to turn our multi-GHz dual-core computers into 486s because of excessive use of web scripting languages that require multiple additional interpretation layers on top of the existing OS.
I mean, even Visual Basic 6 runs more efficiently than some of these web applications I’ve seen of late (and it’s a hell of a lot quicker and more fun to program in too).
And it not even as if there’s a void of lower-level (relatively speaking) languages that compile to run cross-platform binaries (Java, .net) or powerful scripting languages with an already extensive API set and refined interpreters (Ruby, Python, etc)
Bar a few select applications, this trend strikes me as pandering to lazy developers.
Edited 2009-05-12 11:18 UTC
Took the words right out of my mouth… or fingers, as the case may be. Web apps have their place, but it makes just about as much sense to turn every application into a web app as it does for us to go back and use 386’s in this day and age.
You must both be IE users, hey?
Check out Squirrelfish extreme:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#JavaScriptCore
and tracemonkey:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracemonkey
Both of these are JIT compilers for javascript
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIT_compiler
Check out the demo:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/02/mozilla-demos-impre…
Motion detection within a running video, all inside of a web browser.
Edited 2009-05-12 11:41 UTC
You must both be IE users, hey?
Check out Squirrelfish extreme:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#JavaScriptCore
and tracemonkey:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracemonkey
Both of these are JIT compilers for javascript