[REBOL] Re: Groove?
From: woodward:shore at: 11-May-2001 16:53
On Fri, 11 May 2001, Ed O'Connor wrote:
> After a few sessions of using Groove, the novelty
> began to wear off. Although it appears to be slick,
> the UI can be confusing and clunky at times. Some
> tools add new layers of tabs often with the duplicate
> labels.
Yeah - the tabbed interface can be a little clunky. Not sure how to pack
more into a space though; UI metaphores have a long way to go. One of
the skins "cellular" was almost unusable. I almost wish the interface had
retractable panels - kind of like the bookmarks panel under Mozilla.
> Probably most disappointing was the sluggishness of
> the application. Chat really didn't feel like chat
> because of the excessive network latency. This didn't
> make sense to me, because I could chat with these same
> people using REBOL/Express and responses registered
> within 2 seconds. Your milage may vary, but I found
> many of the apps plagued by slow UI interaction.
I usually don't have any trouble with the latency. Generally much faster
than 2 seconds - but then again I have a 100baseT LAN at home with an SDSL
connection to the 'net. Also of all the systems I've used Groove on, the
slowest was a K6-II 300MHz. Also keep in mind that Groove is always
encrypting everything - as it goes onto disk, and out to the net.
The MVC architecture has 2 additional layers in terms of managing the
distribution of UI commands. So, as you click, and type - these events
are queued up for processing against the local store, and packaged up as
XML and encrypted for relay to the other participants in the shared space.
In turn as the model executes these events - the persisted data is
encrypted in stored in an XML object store! So, yeah it's not super fast.
But - for better or worse, the bet is that people will get faster
computing power at their disposal, and faster connections to the 'net.
> In a nutshell, Groove alone isn't a killer app. It's a
> platform (that's better than many) that's looking for
> a killer app.
Agreed...
- Porter Woodward
