There are a couple great posts spawned by a post by Simon Morris on java.net. He talks about three flavors of RIA “religions”, Browserism, Neo-Desktopism, and Pragmatic Neo-Desktopism.

Shaking the gratuitous buzzwords and fictional religious names off, I think there is a lot of relevant material here for Mozpad.

Caught all this by way of Ryan’s post. Ryan makes an excellent point:

The browser is not going to replace desktop applications, it just won’t happen. So instead of focusing so much energy on trying to pull that off, the “Browserists” should engage with the “Neo-Desktopists” and come up with a very web-centric solution for deploying desktop applications.

This idea is what was behind my idea to merge the deployment, distribution, and update mechanisms that exist with Firefox Add-Ons, with XULRunner apps.

So is Mozilla a Browserist, and Mozpad a Neo-Desktopist? You decide, here are the definitions:

Browserism is the belief that the web browser (or comparable page-centric markup-orientated HTTP-bound middleware platform) is the future of end user facing software; a belief solely based on observation that the web is currently the predominant tool for accessing the internet. The goal of Browserism is to slowly evolve a common web platform to include the functionality traditional desktop applications have supported since the rise of the Micro Computer in the early Eighties. Browserists get very excited by user interfaces approximating desktop applications circa 1984 (”wow, you can drag the map!”) or functionality which reminds them of a Commodore 64 (”gee whiz, I can save data onto the computer’s disk itself!”)

Neo-Desktopism is the belief that the web browser as an end user facing application platform is ultimately an evolutionary cul-de-sac. The goal of Neo-Desktopism is to evolve traditional desktop application technologies (for Java, this would be Swing and AWT primarily, although also includes the JRE itself) to a point where they can float free of a physical local client installation, deploying on demand just like web pages. Neo-Desktopities get very excited when their Java WebStart applications actually start on a friend’s laptop first time, without having to spend ten minutes fiddling with their Java installation while gawking at an impossibly long stack trace.

Pragmatic Neo-Desktopism is the belief that the web browser as an end user facing application platform is ultimately an evolutionary cul-de-sac, but we’d all get fired if we admitted that to our bosses. Pragmatic Neo-Desktopities desperately want to write proper Neo-Dekstop software, but are conscious of the fact that the fashion amongst Dilbert-esque managers is for all software to launch from a URL. So they simply embed heavyweight technologies inside a web page, which, while acting totally without sympathy to the host environment, at least keeps the Dilbert-esque managers happy.