Years ago I evangelized the notion of a local scripting engine, serving web apps up into the browser. I thought then, and still think now, this is the biggest untapped opportunity for Perl and Python and Ruby.
Perhaps now that Radio UserLand has broken the ice, the idea of a script-based local app server will gain more traction. DJ Adams, who uses Linux and so can't be an RU user, was intrigued by the channelroll idea. So he grabbed Rael Dornfest's Peerkat and whipped up, in Perl, an app that responds to clicks on a Radio-style coffe-cup icon by injecting the specified RSS feed into an instance of Peerkat.
Very cool. RU is a lively experiment, but the publish/subscribe technology that is part of what makes RU so compelling is not, and should not be, application-specific. DJ is somebody I'll want to subscribe to, and who I'll want to subscribe to me. How we accomplish that is really beside the point.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/03/24.html#a152