Back on Wednesday I attended a meeting put on by IUPUI's Microsoft user group. One of the things they covered was the new one click install feature of .NET 2.0. While taking another free BrainBench test, I started thinking about how all the benefits of this feature could be done in X11. Surprisingly this could be done very simply.
In a world where we're not paranoid, the only thing the web server would need to do is start the application with the proper DISPLAY after I followed a start link. Unfortunately things aren't that simple. I would need to submit my X server's magic cookie hash to the web server. Then the web server could tell the client app all it needs to know about the server.
Although this all starts with stuff we already have, and it's pretty simple to get going there are some problems. Try throwing in actual encryption, NAT traversal, and file access. Yeah, that's all a problem, but on the bright side Linux, the BSDs, and MacOS X all support X. That's better than .NET 2.0.
Problems aside, what do we get? We get all the benefits that centrally hosted web apps have and all the benefits that actual desktop apps have. All that without having to invent anything new, or running a program in a sandbox.
Why couldn't Microsoft have thought of that?
insane
giving a remote system arbitrary control over my local system seems like a bad idea. lets see if we have anything that would indicate whether it is indeed a good or bad idea. hmmm....
aaah yes! ActiveX! That wonderful secure system that suffers absolutely no problems even when it works the way it is suppose to.
/me thwaps Nolan