Thursday, April 02, 2009

Is the browser the new virtual machine ?

It just crossed my mind, as I am developing with GWT (Ext - JS - *Cringe* ) these days, that there is at least one similarity between the Java JVM and the Browser (you name it) as it is perceived these days. So the first and the foremost JVM promise is "write once run everywhere".

I think that with a good JS/CSS framework you can accomplish that in the Browser also. However I am not sure that ALL the browsers are prepared to host efficiently tons of objects (remember how we program in Java =)) ). Some steps have been taken by Chrome to that respect, I hear. However are they prepared for efficient garbage collection, are they secured, stable enough ? How about thinking of a lot of JVM goodies paralleled onto the browser ? (Like are we ever going to have a browser level Terracotta product ? *Cringe* again)