A. Intro - Web Application Development on the Cloud - Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

introduce self, low level coding, video game background
wanted to create cloud web app, taking into account scalability and performance
needed to answer several questions: real time interaction, SQL ceiling
explain project, real time google doc microsoft visio (only white board) google drawings now exists
explain that project needed to be reasonable, but I also did research on related technologies
explain how project can be optimized for real time interaction and scalability

Picture of LOTS of logos

Network Diagram

reason we have so much is heterogeneous nature of internet
variety of different hardware, operating systems, and platforms servers must interface with
including special devices connected to internet, embedded devices, like ATM machines

Technology Diagram

how do we go about choosing technologies?
have more control over servers with machine images (not Google App Engine) and is only one server
only neeed to figure out better conncurency (Erlang) and databases (NoSQL)
tricky in deciding client technologies, may need to implement client multiple times for higher user base
client tech can impact choice of server tech, if you have Android & iOS clients, may not get to do remoting
if you use SOAP rather than direct remoting, it can solve this problem (can't use mobile agents though)

Keep technologies to a minimal

Web Browsers

Solution: Plug ins!

by pass clunky browser app programming with plug in designed for apps SUN, Microsoft, Adobe
plug ins have come much farther for app UI, QT QML looks like flex MXML, silverlight AML
Microsoft Silverlight sub-set of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
can program your own controls using object oriented programming with lower level GUI environment
more advanced layouts than "floats", enhances modularity

Big Mobile Diagram

mobile much more commonplace
platforms and OSes needing support exploded
flash, silverlight, java, all have thier own platform, not just plug in now
mobile developers in favor of bypassing browser (mobile facebook native app rather than HTML5) except affects user base
all of these could be thought of as virtual operating systems
Steve jobs against flash in iOS at first
how to reduce all of this complexity?

HTML5 to the rescue!

a lot of people putting a lot of faith in HTML5 for write once deploy everywhere
microsoft and adobe jumping on the HTML5 bandwagon
HTML5 has lots of problems

W3C too slow

one critisism is it is solving problems from years ago 2007
finalizing standards is too slow
still has rigid functionality like old HTML bad widgets (but now has drag and drop, canvas and websockets)
large amount of high level standards

HTML5 diagram

a lot of standards taking a lot of time to finalize and implement in commercial browers
what happens when something new is invented (Google Glass)
trying to solve too many problems in one set of standards
they got the idea and started making standards more modular

What are we trying to solve?

HTML5 diagram

it's not the portability that people are excited about, its the standardization
Java has been around a long time, just not as standard. Flash now installed on most machines.
unfortunatly other platforms are much more elegant about being application platforms
HTML5 the focus is on standardization, all devices will use it, sort of like mainframe terminals

Some Limitations

1) standardization process takes a long time 2007-2014, 7 years
2) became modular to speed up process, WebGL for low level, could make google glass with gestures faster
3) Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) (Living Standard)
4) Plug-ins still offer advanced Widget framework (must use HTML5 canvas, make them from scratch, google glass)

Weakest aspect of HTML5 JavaScript

1) JavaScript is another weakly typed, garbage collected scripting language (adding strong typing)
2) Google went thought the trouble to invent (GWT) to fix this problem
3) dot NET is more advanced here, byte code decoupled from langauge
4) we are now using GPUs for parallel processing, gonna have to wait for a HTML5 interface to something like Cuda
5) if someone invents a superb language, we are still stuck with javascript
6) going away from object hierchys, and going towards data oriented design, component architectures

Better Idea - Universal Byte Code

Good trends

HTML5 is attempting to become a universal computing system
NaCl interesting because it uses Chrome as Virtual OS, LLVM as UITF, and Pepper, HTML5 interface as device drivers
maybe could have been created faster if was designing a system like this from the start
if the target was mobile, needs to be as effiecent as possible
build canvas on top of lower level standard for faster standardization process
don't need to make any specifications about JavaScript with Universal Byte code can decouple as much as possible from std process
we have the technology to do this, but not the technology to standardize it

Server Considerations

people building NoSQL databases to speed up operations (may not be nessisary if you do caching with an SQL database)
Most Server techs can't cache (Php, ASP, JSP) (Erlang can, Zotonic CMS uses SQL)
World of Warcraft uses SQL, but servers are C++ so caching is certainly taking place
Operating Systems designed to run across distrubuted networks (CloudOS) CloudLinux, Oracle Solaris 11
Node.js has non-blocking IO (bit of an odd creature)
Erlang has high concurrency, also runs nicely across cluster (completely parrellel, actors do not share memory)
apache can't compete with Erlang actors with threads

List of various application structures

Would be nice if these servers could more seamlessly interface with clients using their own languages, may not be possible with JavaScript, but possible by JIT compilation to some universal byte code