[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] Date Index Thread Index Search archive:
Date:Mon Oct 27 10:33:39 1995 
Subject:Pop and the Web 
From:Jocelyn Paine 
Volume-ID:951028.01 

Thanks to the people who have replied about interfacing Poplog and WWW.
I agree with Steve that Pop would be an excellent alternative to Perl -
or to Rexx, which is what I was using on a recent OS/2 project. (The
Institute for Fiscal Studies "Be Your Own Chancellor", if anyone's come
across it: it's been written up on various financial pages.)

However, I'm interested in more than that. I've been wondering about
using the Web as a way of delivering AI programs such as my "Eden"
microworld thing, demos of planning, search, etc. As people are
beginning to realise generally, there should be (once the technology
advances a bit) the potential to avoid a lot of system-dependent GUI
hacking, since the browser does the hard work of display and layout.

I think that at the moment, I could just about deliver Eden over the Web
by using dynamically generated GIF files - it might be necessary to
generate clickable maps too. Together with input forms, this would allow
students to zoom in on parts of an image, to quit the current session,
and so on. However, it wouldn't allow the reader to (for example) wire
up neural networks by drag-and-join, or to run an animation that sends
new pages at regular intervals. (Actually, Netscape's Server Push
feature will do the latter, but I think it's a bit unpredictable in
timing.)

It occurred to me that one could define one's own viewers for new image
file types. These might be more appropriate for some of the images
appearing in my AI demos than the standard graphics formats. (Roll on
VRML.) Also, these viewers might be able to run some of the interaction
locally. However, I don't think it's possible to send HTTP requests back
from such viewers to the server. Java should be able to cope with the
latter, once it's available.

Incidentally, has anyone had any success in getting technical info on
Netscape's implementation of, and plans for, Java out of Netscape? They
seem to be ignoring my emails.

Jocelyn