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pmuellr is Patrick Mueller

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Saturday, March 04, 2006

Javascript evolution

I'd been thinking for a while now about writing some kind of JS app and making use of my .mac iDisk space via WebDAV. Should work fine with XmlHttpRequest. Why aren't more people doing this? I guess WebDAV is not that prevalent. Actually, an even more interesting story would be using SVN, since they support Autoversioning via WebDAV. Slick.

For iDisk anyway, Alex Young posted a blog comment a while back pointing out some Javascript files on idisk.mac.com that Apple uses to access iDisk itself from the web. There's somewhere to look for help anyway. WebDAV isn't, generally, that hard of a thing to deal with, although I've always run into odd little problems with it.

And, by the way, What the frick is that ZIP webdav method? hmmm.

So, imagine I have some nice utilities to access files. Files. What other operating system-ish capabilities could you imagine? Start simple and say you have a 'page' which is really a 'desktop'. You create a windowing system, allow folks to create new windows (floating divs?) with shell trimmings that the 'os' manages. A little app controls the content of the window. hmmm. Kind of like live.com, only a desktop, not a page.

In general, I think it's an interesting space to be in, to watch folks extend Javascript usage/capabilities, since the great Ajax hype started anyway. DOS 2.1 days. What's the Win 3.1 version going to look like? What's the Mac OS X version going to look like?

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