[mythtv] BrowserBased setup

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 12:36:31PM +0200, Per Lundberg wrote:
> 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"... :-)

It certainly won't come from Microsoft or Sun/Oracle.  They only have
their own interests in mind.  Way too many Windows only features are
getting into silverlight for it to ever be run anywhere.  Java tried
that crap too and it too didn't work.  If you want to be able to interact
with the OS it becomes very hard to run anywhere without explicit support
for each of those 'anywheres'.

There is the idea of marketing people and designers, and then there
is reality.

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

Almost all mythtv users.  The vast majority.

> 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... :-)

I don't have a windows machine to work on.  I don't want one either.
Too much work to maintain.  Way too expensive.  I also HATE visual studio
(as well as every other IDE).  Visual studio is probably the best IDE
I have ever seen, but it is still an IDE and it still sucks.

> 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. :-)

Most developers are awful at making friendly user interfaces.  Mythtv is
certainly an example of that.  It works great underneath and has lots of
features, but where you get to those features is an inconsistent mess.
Not that I think I could do any better myself (being a typical developer
and all).  My wife keeps threatening to attack mythtv, but should
probably finish her PhD first.  Not sure if the UI or the scheduler
offends her more.

-- 
Len Sorensen