Dart and Google Cloud Platform
dartlang.org
dartlang.org
App Engine is a subset of Cloud Platform services and is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering – auto scaling, a scalable datastore, logging and other managed services and guarantees that aim to substantially reduce your DevOps.
By contrast, Compute Engine (and its closest competitor AWS) is more an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering – provision your instances and run anything you'd like on it, as well as choose from available resources like load balancers and firewalls to meet your needs.
Managed VMs attempt to offer the best of both worlds: the managed scalability of App Engine with the choice and flexibility of Compute Engine. Through a Docker-based container approach, App Engine scalability guarantees are still kept while allowing you to run your own language, like Dart or Node.js, and services.
My Dart app, http://woven.co, has been running on Compute Engine, and I plan to move it to App Engine.
Theres certainly no immediate path forwards towards that end goal at the moment.
Dart2js, atscript and other compile to javascript things are where its going to be at for the forseeable future.
The spirit of IE lives!
We are working on it. Inbox was designed to be 'mobile first' and use "Material Design" animations, and pulling off 60fps animations of that style in an app like Inbox is very complex, in fact, each new version of Chrome broke assumptions and broke animations we had running previously. The Web, as a platform for competing with mobile-style interfaces, is in a rickety state at the moment, where performance is non-deterministic not only across browsers, but across versions. We often have to work with the engineers on the browser layout engines directly to resolve these issues. We're working full time on Firefox now, with Mozilla engineers helping, which is a lot easier to do now that the project isn't secret anymore.
I do think it is unfortunate that the error page advertised Chrome. I think we could have handled that better by saying "Firefox is coming soon, we'll email you when it's ready, click here" or some such, rather than putting a 'Download Chrome' link.
I understand that you want 60fps flawless performance for your new product. But if you need to work in close cooperation with a browser vendor in order to enable that, then either you work closely with all the browser vendors - which might be possible in theory, but unlikely in practice (you don't have enough resources/interest, they don't have enough resources/interest) - or your product will not run on all browsers.
I honestly think this approach is not a good one. Alternatives which are at least less bad are
1. Let everyone run the app. Yes, some browsers will not hit 60fps. That's already true - even if they run it on your choice of browser, it may be on a slow machine. In this approach, some browsers will do less well, and one may be tempted to write something to the effect of "best experienced in X" but that's just getting back to that tweet (which while snarky, had a valid point). The best you can do here is proactively test on other browsers and file perf bugs on them. Reduced testcases can be filed before your product is public.
or
2. Rely less on browser optimizations. As your linked comment correctly mentions, how browsers do layout, create layers, upload them to the GPU, etc. differs between browsers. But the web is no longer limited to that. You can use WebGL - now present even in modern versions of IE and Safari, which means in all browsers - which gives you explicit control of how to create layers, when to upload to the GPU, etc. Of course, this is no guarantee of 60fps performance everywhere (nothing is, there are slow GPUs, etc.), but it has a far higher chance of running at a predictable and high frame rate than letting the browser's layout engine guess for you.
This is a problem at big companies like Google and probably Apple, is that we time major sets of released functionality for 'big impact' launches like Google I/O, or other media events, and the poor engineers are left working late into the night to meet the deadlines.
As for just rendering everything with WebGL or Canvas, we could do that (Google Sheets uses Canvas), but it kind of rubs me the wrong way, it doesn't feel "webby". You end up reimplementing tons of stuff: Bidi/I18N text handling, A11Y, system behaviors like text selection, clipboard, it just seems like you're making your own Flash runtime in JS, an alien hybrid that displaces the entire browser engine.
I hope apps like Inbox, and the new focus on mobile web performance by both Google and Mozilla can fix many of these layout/rasterization/composite hazards, either at the spec level (e.g. will-change), or at the implementation level, so much like there is a 'war' on JS performance, there can be a 'war' on layout and paint performance.
Long term, if we want the web to succeed and not be destroyed by mobile native apps, we need it to work -- as the web --, and not as simply opaque WebGL + JS, that's basically just a native app model with a different VM.
But isn't "designed for Chrome and Firefox" just a marginally better thing than "designed for Chrome"? It's still tailor-made for specific browsers, just 2 instead of 1. That's very un-"webby".
Cognitive friction.
"... Cognitive friction doesn't come from technology,
but from the people who control technology. The are
the masters because they know how to think in ways
that are sympathetic to silicon, and they imagine
that everyone thinks in the same way. ..."
Alan Cooper
*"... As engineers, they think more about gears
than aout leather, so the interface to the human
user is expressed in those 'implementation' terms,
which is why I call products designed this way as
having an *implementation model*. ..."
Alan Cooper
If we designed product features based on technical decisions, we would not have had so much trouble, because we would have simply picked the lowest common denominator we could get away with to deliver the product and not pushed on sharp edges in the stack.
We take a design based on how the product must or should behave, the engineers do not run the show.
As an aside, I value the Web not because of implementation details (I'm not a particular fan of CSS or JS) but because of high level properties it has that native mobile apps do not have. That's why I'd rather see a return to web applications over time. Web apps produce positive net externalities that native silos do not.
These don't matter for the short term, or the individual, but they matter collectively over the long term for society. I may not be able to access content siloed to apps 30 years from now, but I'll probably still be able to find Web content indexed and stored on archive.org
I view developing for the Web as planting trees in a forest that is logged for value over time by society, by businesses, that extract value. We are caretakers of it, and should put back into it so that the those who come after us can derive value as well.
I'm not sure how developing a native iOS app, for example, will help our grandkids the way making an open ecosystem and publishing lots of content that can be freely indexed, mashed up, and repurposed will. I imagine future archaelogists will have a much easier time digging up value from the Web than trying to dig up App Stores for information.
Your head is filled with Google jingoism tailored to almost fit the ideals you're trying to spout, but you failed to create an open application.
But even if they stopped at Chrome only support, that is still better than Android/Windows/iOS app, as at least you can install Chrome on anything.
Do you give crap to every iOS developer out their for releasing only for 1 platform? Or is this just "Google is evil" cargo-culting?
Native mobile apps rub me the wrong way if they could have been open standars web apps, with some reasonable definition of open standards.
The web is a repository of knowledge, with also a lot of cruft, and that knowledge should be accessible well into the future.
To share my perspective, outside Google:
A similar "error/ad" appears for other some other Google features. Such as trying to edit a picture in Google+ -- I've seen that example for so long now, it seems there's no intent ever to change it.
With each such example, the cumulative effect is to remind me of bad days in the past. My feeling isn't snarky, it's unease. I've seen stuff like Prodigy and CompuServe. I saw Microsoft pivot MSN 1.0 from being another such service, to instead be a web site.
And ever since, I've seen a succession of attempts to "put the open internet genie back in the bottle", including but not limited to Internet Explorer. So far these attempts have failed... but they haven't been from a company as powerful as Google.
So as someone who had loved Google for many years as a supporter of the open internet, it makes me unhappy and confused to see more examples of "Download Chrome!" as an error message in Firefox.
Having said all that, I'm happy to hear that you plan to address this at least for Inbox on Firefox.
Making small, fast, compatible Javascript is critical to the success of Dart.