Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Atlas: Microsoft Goes After Ruby on Rails

So. On one hand, you can "wait" for Microsoft to release their "Atlas Product" whose roadmap appears to be what Ruby on Rails delivers today.

Or you can start right-away building richer web applications with free and open-source frameworks maintained by communities of developers such as Ruby on Rails and the Prototype JS library.

The article about Microsoft Atlas mentions they'll be offering a text completion widget. Not that I'm pretentious enough to even dream of Microsoft including my hard work into their framework, but I'm wondering whether I should move it from a BSD License to a GPL License. Right now, the code isn't even close to be as clean or elegant as it should be, but as I strive to meet standards put forth by the Prototype JS Library, so the framework becomes more maintainable and extendable, i wouldn't be surprised to see entities sell their own frameworks built on-top of WICK, without contributing anything back to the project.

What do you guys think?

The following quotes from the Atlas roadmap are worrying me:
With Atlas, we plan on providing programmable access to a local store/cache, so that applications can locally cache data easily, efficiently and securely.
As far as i know, and i may be wrong, this type of caching mechanism isn't yet available in any browser code base but Windows IE. I believe they're referring to the "Internet Explorer userData cache". I've used it back in 1999 in experimental projects, and it came-in handy at times, but use cases for this feature are limited. It worries me because I can see many developers who currently think of AJAX as this cool cross-platform way of doing things, seeing Atlas as an AJAX framework, and start abusing features such as this one for which there are no standards, and will bring us right back to the dark ages of a broken web.

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