Building a better Google

Posted on 25 Sep 2009 at 17:00

Mark Newton searches for pizza in Cambridge, only to discover the future of web applications

After various awards for the year's presenters the presentations started, and the one that particularly caught my attention was by Mike Taulty from Microsoft. Mike's style is relaxed and his coding knowledge is beyond question, as he demonstrated what would be new in Silverlight 3 with real code in his easy-to-follow fashion (much better than some speakers who tried to amaze with their knowledge, but instead left us cold and confused).

Silverlight 3 has a lot of new features, but the one that really interested me was the ability to move your web app out of the browser and install it on your desktop, in which mode the application will update whenever a new version appears, which should make rolling out applications even easier. Silverlight 3 supports not only the browser's back and forward buttons, but also allows access via a URL query string, which means you can expose "normal" links that will work from within your Silverlight Application.

For example, www.myapp.com/sl3.xap?hotel=ritz might make your app display the details of the Ritz hotel. Silverlight 3 will also allow access to the user's file system, so reading and writing files to the desktop will become possible, but only with the user's permission through a File | Open dialog box.

This gave me an idea for re-writing one of my major apps in Silverlight 3, and no doubt I'll regale you with my efforts in the future. When asked for a show of hands of those developing in Silverlight 2 only a few went up, so perhaps the message isn't getting across from Microsoft about how cool Silverlight is, or perhaps Adobe's Flash is still the way to go.

I got talking to a number of developers at NxtGenUG Fest09, all of who seemed to be in this business because they enjoyed the creative process of writing applications, even with all the problems that can arise. One concern that was raised was that, in the past many developers have relied on faster and faster processors to handle the increased capabilities of each new version of their app, but it looks like we may have started to reach a limit to the maximum speed of a CPU.

Cooking cores

Look around at the current crop of machines you can buy and most of them will be running sub-3GHz clocks but have multiple processor cores. The reason for this is that the amount of heat generated increases dramatically with CPU speed, and according to Chris Bishop, chief research scientist at Microsoft Research and a speaker at Fest09, the heat produced by a modern CPU is equivalent to a hot-plate of an electric cooker.

within ten years' time the surface temperature of a CPU chip would approach that of the surface of the sun

If we carried on doubling the clock speed every two years as Moore's law has accurately predicted in the past, then within ten years' time the surface temperature of a CPU chip would approach that of the surface of the sun, which might be handy for tanning salons but something of a problem in the server room.

The current answer to this problem is to stay below the 3GHz barrier and add more processor cores, although the "gotcha" there is that an application designed to run on a single CPU may in fact run slower on a modern PC than it did on the older one, because each CPU will often be running at a slower clock speed - and although there may be four or more in the box, the application in question can use only one of them.

Developers have to come to terms with multithreading and such perils as deadlock and race conditions to be sure their future applications perform well. We certainly are living in "interesting times", in the fullest sense of the old Chinese curse.