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I came across the Mix Gestalt project tonight and I thought I’d share some thoughts. It’s a bit of script that effectively sucks code snippets in languages other than Javascript out of your page and converts them to programs running on the .NET platform.

While interesting, it has a number of drawbacks that make it far less interesting than the HTML5-based approach that works in the standards-compliant browsers based on WebKit, Gecko and Opera, as well as the improved IE8.

First of all, it has to bootstrap .NET into Firefox (or whichever browser you are running it in).  This adds a few milliseconds to your page’s cold load time if it’s not already loaded. In the day and age of fast websites, any additional page time is just a no-go.

Once it’s up and running, the code that Gestalt compiles has to talk to the browser over the NPRuntime interface. Imagining pushing the number of operations required to do 3D rendering or real-time video processing becomes very difficult.  To offer a comparison, the Javascript code that runs in Firefox is JIT’d to native code. When the native code has to interact with the DOM, it gets dispatched through a set of much faster quickstubs. For browsers that run plugins out-of-process like Chrome and the future Mozilla, NPRuntime will be even worse!

One of the other claims about Gestalt is that it preserves the integrity of “View Source”. I’d argue that View Source is dead - and it has been for some time now. I rarely trust the View Source representation of the page.The web is still open, but it’s more about inspecting elements and runtime styles and being able to tweak those. I rarely trust the View Source representation of the page. Dynamic DOM manipulation has all but obsoleted it. Firebug provides this for Firefox, while Chrome and Safari come with an advanced set of developer tools out of the box. Even IE8 provides a basic, though buggy set of inspection tools.

The last unfortunate point for the Gestalt project is that it requires a plugin installation on Windows and Mac, and is effectively unsupported under Linux. You won’t see any of these Gestalt apps running on an iPhone or Android device any time soon either.

So where do I see the right path?  HTML5 as a platform is powerful. Between <canvas>,  SVG, and HTML5 <video> you get virtually the same rendering power as the XAML underlying Gestalt, but a significantly larger reach.

As for the scripting languages, Javascript is the only language that you’ll be able to use on every desktop and every device on the market today. Why interpret the <script> blocks on the client when you can compile the Python and Ruby to Javascript itself, allowing it to work on any system?

Regular readers of my blog will know that I’m a big fan of GWT - a project that effectively compiles Java to Javascript. For those interested in writing in Python, Pyjamas is an equivalent project. I’m sure that there must be a Ruby equivalent out there as well.

Javascript is the Lingua Franca of the web, so any project that hopes to bring other languages to it will have to take advantage of it if it.  I’d hope that the Gestalt project evolves into one that leverages, rather than tries to replace the things that the browser does well.

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