[mythtv] BrowserBased setup

[Per Lundberg]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Karl Dietz
<dekarl at spaetfruehstuecken.org> wrote:

Hi Karl,

Nice to see you here on this mailing list also. :-)

>> 1) Regarding the "Silverlight is dead" issue, this is a rumor that
> I'd consider it more a "the people doing the development don't like to
> use Silverlight" issue. The reason doesn't really matter.

This is of course, a highly valid point. People's opinions differ. I
have a hard time understanding why people would choose something like
Javascript (which you will eventually have to use if you want to make
a "modern" web application by todays standards) over C#, really.

The only real points (which I have no problems accepting) are those
brought up in this discussion: less accessible developer tools, less
accessible runtime. Fair enough - as said, I agree to these points. I
find them a bit sad though, since the developer experience for me
personally is that writing code in a Silverlight/C# environment is
much, much more "fun" and stimulating than having to "dumb down" your
architecture to the "traditional" web standards. (HTML+JS)

I'm not saying Silverlight is the only future for the web, but I
sincerely *hope* that Javascript doesn't exist (or is at least not as
predominant as it is today) in 10 years to come. Hopefully, ECMA or
whoever can bring forth a "standardized" version of
Flash/Silverlight/whatever you want to call it that can combine the
best of these both worlds - a managed code environment, with full
IntelliSense support, with a cross-browser, cross-operating system
runtime that lets you "write once, run anywhere"... :-)

>> 2) Regarding the "it doesn't work on Linux/BSD" - yes, this is indeed
> Which is a very good reason, as forcing users/devs to use two operating
> systems, just because, is just making for a higher barrier on entry for
> everyone without benefits.

Yes, but I'm just question how many people would actually be affected by this...

>> 3) Regarding the "who has a Silverlight development environment?", it
> Sure, you can download that from Microsoft, but you can equally well
> download Eclipse with RAP/GWT and PHP/C++ development tools and just
> setup that.

I haven't argued against that. I'm just saying that it's not really
impossible to setup a Silverlight development environment for anyone
willing. The keyword is the last word in my previous sentence... :-)

> In the end it's mostly what the people that are doing all the hard work
> have experience with already.

This is the key point here. And, I'd like to add, it's also the kind
of new developers we want to attract to the project... It's not
unlikely that Silverlight guys would be pretty good at making
user-friendly, intuitive user interfaces. We would benefit from having
these people come into the MythTV development. (Hehe, yeah, I know
that this is purely hypothetical and highly speculative from my
behalf. :-)
-- 
Best regards,
Per Lundberg