The Document Abstraction

There are two ways to go with an Office 2.0 application. You can either use the familiar document abstraction, where the user makes changes to the document within the browser and finally commits them with a save. This is the familiar Office workflow, with the document being kept in JavaScript memory. The alternative is to break the document abstractions somehow. Basecamp is a great example of this. You do not work with a single monolithic document. Instead, you make and commit small changes, one change at a time.

From the point of view of building a web application, the second way is the much friendlier way to go. Easier on the browser. Easier on the database. But it's not really feasible for applications competing against the word processor or the spreadsheet. I suspect that those using the document abstraction are eventually gonna run into problems with very large documents. After all, there are going to be costs to tunneling through HTTP and browsers. Those tunneling costs are likely to surface as performance issues. We all know how some browsers begin to choke on very large pages. Toss big pages together with lots of data kept in JavaScript and you have a recipe for trouble.

There is a technical opportunity here, I feel. The great thing about the browser is that it is a universal platform. The terrible thing about the browser is that it really wasn't designed to be an application platform. If a developer wants to build a document-centric Web application, she is still missing that sweet spot of tools and best practices to make things work out. Is Flex the answer? Is Java WebStart?