No Google Office To Be Expected

According to an interview of Sergey Brin (founder of Google) by John Battelle, Google does not plan to publish a web based office, as rumored before (fueled by a new partnership between Google and Sun (owner of openoffice.org)).

“I don’t really think that the thing is to take a previous generation of technology and port them directly,” he said. I agree with that. We have to think about new tools to be our future web apps. Just porting office apps to the web won’t work.

So what’s this deal about now? Google seems to want a wider distribution of their toolbar. According to the Cnet coverage (via John Battelle again):

“Details about what exactly that will entail were vague at best, with the only nugget offered being that Sun, in the immediate future, will make Google’s toolbar a standard part of the package when users download Sun’s Java Runtime Environment from the server seller’s Web site.”

Sergey Brin further stated that distributed thin web applications allowed you to do “new and better things than the Office package and more.” So further tools by Google can be expected.

google, office, sun, openoffice, ajax

Code downloading with AJAX

Earlier, I suggested to use Code Downloading in order to reduce the size of AJAX application. I left the term undescribed, but I will change this now:

As JavaScript is an interpreted language, it is quite easy to load additional code, even after the application has “started”. This means that only code absolutely necessary to display the app has to be loaded initially.

In the following example, we define a function test() in the context of an object App. Then via Ajax the original code is overwritten. Naturally also new functions can be loaded.



The downloaded code is eval’uated, i.e. it is executed. You cannot only execute statements but also define variables and functions.
Source of load.js:

App.test = function() {
alert("additional code loaded");
}

I have set up an example implementation of this.

This allows more flexibility for larger apps. My “negative” example, Kiko, could use this method to enormously reduce the amount of code to be loaded initially.

I alse see the possibility to only store encrypted Javascript source code on the server and decrypt it on-the-fly (of course also this would only prevent script kiddies from stealing, but it could challenge some hacker a bit more).

ajax, code downloading