[Zope-Moz] some thoughts about zope-moz and some really blue sky stuff

[Jake Kauth]

hey all

i've been thinking about zope-moz has going for it and have been
blue-skying a bit.

first of all, i hate the web.  all this
HTML/CSS/DOM/Java/Javascript/CGI/Database
stuff is INSANE.   to render one pretty page with javascript "waveovers" is
a
nightmare of language-inside-language-inside-markup! 

whoever thought of this Web thing anyways?  the whole idea of stateless 
programming is a horrible thing!  

nowadays, everything we do as programmers gets so convoluted by layer after
layer 
of markup languages that building scalable net-based applications has 
become a nightmare!

anyways, that's just how i feel about the thing :-)

so here's some blue sky stuff i'm been thinking about as zope-moz moves
forward:

 - embed a python interpreter in the mozilla.  (do the "java" thing and
let's work on
   getting python "out there" and ubiquitous.  of course the same security
encapsulation
   techniques would have to be applied to the python interpreter, but it
can be done.

   java sucks.  

   propietary bad.  open-source good.  open-source is INSIDIOUS.  

   we can slowly infiltrate the browsers with python programming without
having ot 
   worry about market-share and deadlines.

 - given that we have a python interpreter in the browser, we could in fact
embed a 
   zope server in each browser, or at least a "ZopeRPC" server.  

   (a zope-style server has the benefit of encapsulating objects rather
than 
   functional-style RPC calls, but the idea is there)

 - then we get rid of the "stateless" style of browsing a web site by
opening up 
   objects in both the server and the browser, which talk to each other 
   in a stateful way, without cookies

 - now we bind our business logic loosely with the presentation of a site,
so that we 
   can change page design quickly and easily.  

   this is a zope capability already, but i'm talking about moving a lot
more 
   of the heavy lifting out to the browser end of the browsing process.

basically, i see the zope-moz effort as a way to develop better zope
applicatios.  but it 
seems the talk has been about zope-moz as a *developer's* aid, and not a
lot of talk 
about rolling this technology out as something to be used by the end
users.  

could an entire python interpreter be installed as a plug-in?  since we
have
python for every unix, mac an PC out there, what's to prevent us from
having python as
an embedded language in the browser, and available for remote-object
invocation 
from the client side?  TCL has a plugin for the major browser, why can't
we?  
or has this been done and i haven't seen it?

most real web applications have a lot in common with the end products of 
traditional rapid-application development GUI developers.  perhaps the gui
objects of a 
web page should be represented as an entirely new GUI programming API?

i think it should be possible to write a program in the style (and ease) of 
tkinter, and to simply have the remote display part of the application 
appear in the browser, without getting caught up in the whole
stateless-programming
mess that is the Web of today.

Jpython goes a long way, but it would be nice if we could have the native
widgets
available via Tkinter.

am i insane?  is there any technology doing this already out there?  is all
of
this part of the DOM support in python?  

jake
*****