Comments on: Slingshot (Public Release)

By: Derick

Derick — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 07:48:28 +0000

Any news on PPC support? this is a critical feature for me since I’m using RoR to replace an antiquated DOS app for my students, and about 1/3 of them are on PPC macs – hoping to transcend ties to a particular platform.

By: David M. Besonen

David M. Besonen — Wed, 09 May 2007 22:11:44 +0000

@ David Young: any thoughts on bundling a renderer? fwiw, i really think it should be Gecko.

note: i’ve also posted this issue to the magnetk blog and the slingshot mailing list (let’s discuss this there): http://lists.joyent.com/mailman/listinfo/slingshot

By: David Young

David Young — Fri, 04 May 2007 19:05:47 +0000

@Nick: Slingshot is using the system-provided HTML renderer. Well put.

By: Julik

Julik — Fri, 04 May 2007 15:48:56 +0000

@david: Nice to know PPC will be available. Will take a look at Slingshot when it’s a fact.

The question concerning the renderer – it’s not the same. You dn’t have to support a renderer. Why settle for IE with Slingshot whereas if you use the container paradigm you can just bundle your own renderer with the machine? Granted, it will make the download bigger, but the relief on the designers/JSers would be immense. And granted, integrating Mozilla or WebKit is nowhere as easy as dragging IE controls in Visual Studio – but the outcome would be worth it. Maybe this is something the Magnetik foplks ought to be confronted with ASAP.

That said, I’ll be watching Slingshot with growing interest.

By: Nick Caldwell

Nick Caldwell — Fri, 04 May 2007 07:30:14 +0000

Hmm. Let me try to diagram this.

Slingshot on Macintel only = lockout of PPC users

Embedded WebKit (for instance) on both platforms = lockout of Windows users?

I’m probably starting to appear combative and I don’t mean to — I’m just confused by the logic. If, as I intimated in my previous post, Slingshot actually is using the system-provided HTML renderer, then the confusion goes away.

Really, I don’t think it would actually change any of my design practices, because, as you say, we’d have to be testing for compatibility against IE anyway. But it would be very nice to be able to deliver a visually enriched (through CSS3 progressive enhancement) experience through Slingshot if it could rely on a better renderer on both platforms.

By: David Young

David Young — Fri, 04 May 2007 04:49:55 +0000

@Nick: If a website is meant to work on Windows, it probably works on IE. That’s the dominant rendering engine on that platform. Remember, the Rails app that works in Slingshot can also used on the server that will be accessed by web browsers. So, I was arguing this approach (support the dominant) was similar to Julik’s argument that we should support PPC because it is still the dominant Macintosh platform.

By: Nick Caldwell

Nick Caldwell — Fri, 04 May 2007 04:05:01 +0000

David,

I don’t quite get the parallel logic in your example – using a non-IE rendering engine on the Windows client shouldn’t actually lock anyone out, whereas not building a PPC-compatible client on the Mac side locks virtually everyone out. Or are you saying that Slingshot isn’t bundling its own version of the renderer in either case?

By: David Young

David Young — Thu, 03 May 2007 21:53:57 +0000

@Jon: there’s a mailinglist for Slingshot development.

http://lists.joyent.com/mailman/listinfo/slingshot

By: David Young

David Young — Thu, 03 May 2007 21:38:51 +0000

@Julik: we’re looking into providing a PPC version sooner rather than later. We use WebKit on OS X because that’s the dominant browser. Same for Windows and IE. The logic for supporting IE on Windows is the same logic you employed to argue for a PPC version of Slingshot.

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 03 May 2007 18:38:37 +0000

Is anyone else’s javascript completely non-functional in Slingshot? I’m not seeing any errors – it’s just that my app appears to be a static web page.