Re: [be] Re: [LinuxUser] Cloud Computing and Bible Translation

[Teus Benschop]

Browsers will be much more resource hungry as compared to native
applications. A browser will use much less resources if the application
limits itself to using html and css only. It is also much faster to
download. For that reason use of Javascript should be limited as much as
possible. Statistics on the internet show that 5% of the browsers have
JavaScript disabled, which is another reason not to use it. An advantage
of the browser based applications is that it does only use memory while
a submission is handled or a page is requested. After the script that
handles the request has finished, it uses no extra memory. A native
application stays in memory all the time. Using the cloud seems to be
the way the world is going. But the greatest advantage of using the
browser is that there's no special installation of software needed on
the mother tongue translator's computer. Any computer bought in the shop
or coming back after repair will run the translation application out of
the box. This all depends of course on available of a network, which is
what is the biggest problem here in many cases. Teus.
On Thu, 2010-02-18 at 23:32 -0700, Neil Mayhew wrote:
> My reservation about cloud computing is that use of the browser and 
> JavaScript as a platform for applications is incredibly wasteful of 
> machine resources. In my experience, it takes at least an order of 
> magnitude (10x) more powerful hardware to provide the same functionality 
> as a native application. This is fine for people with big laptops or 
> desktops, but it's a real problem on low-power machines such as the 
> OLPC. Just watch how the Sugar Browse activity bogs down on a complex 
> web site such as GMail.
>