[williamcotton]

There is a world of interesting opportunities available in an ecosystem where code is pushed, interpreted, and executed on the client.

For example, when I'm working with audio software I frequently use VST audio plugins in my projects. Unfortunately, my projects aren't very portable because they require the same plugins to be installed on another machine in order to open that project. When you can't control the dependencies that may or may not exist on someone's machine, you have a really annoying ecosystem. Most professional software environments suffer from this.

If instead, my DAW software was running based completely on sandboxed code executed locally but being served up remotely, then I can move from machine to machine effortlessly and collaborate incredibly easily with other producers and musicians. Of course, this is not the only use case.

Also, the browser and JavaScript don't HAVE to be the way forward, but there is a massive amount of momentum and very few competitors with any sort of traction.

Also, read up, son: Websockets, Web Workers, CORS, WebGL, Web Audio API, WebRTC, MediaStream API, DataStream API.

The approach is to maintain the sandbox and therefore allow arbitrary code to be run while increasing the number of hardware accelerated interfaces to the machine.

[jrabone]

If instead, my DAW software was running based completely on sandboxed code executed locally but being served up remotely, then I can move from machine to machine effortlessly and collaborate incredibly easily with other producers and musicians. Of course, this is not the only use case.

But isn't that really licensing requirements, rather than technical requirements? Or the 20+GB sample libraries that things like Superior Drummer haul around? I don't see how you could remote-serve that kind of content, any more than you could, say, Skyrim. Now, remote rendering MIDI data and streaming back the audio might work, but I use many VST plugins as real-time processors (amp sims etc.) Knowing how much effort I've sunk into optimising everything on this computer for real-time playable latencies without glitching, I'm having a hard time believing that the Web Audio API is going to cut it for my use case, unless it's basically just ASIO. There simply isn't much opportunity for any buffering at 5ms latency, so that "sandbox" might end up sharing memory rather a lot...