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SubjectRe: ActiveWhy (was Re: Comments on Microsoft Open Source document)


I thought the problem with creating crossplatform apps was with the actual
porting of the program... Isn't activeX only PC win? Plus compiling such
an app would still be an enourmously long amount of time relative to java
loading and execution. The best solution (I think) is to have Java
compiled machine code when speed is an absolute necessity. Then selecting
the program specific to your platform would be nice, although there is
absolutely no security features with such a situation because all the
security features of java are imbedded in the interpreter. Plus you would
never know whether the app was truely coded in Java and not C or some
other language. Still it would be nice to compile java byte-code into
machine code. I remember seeing some GNU util that dumps ASM... but not a
fullscale compiler yet.

~~Kev


On Thu, 12 Nov 1998, Pete Chown wrote:

> ralf@uni-koblenz.de wrote:
>
> > Time for the politicians and
> > lawyer on this list to think about this and warm up their MUAs.
>
> Well, I'm not either, but here is an idea I had a little while back. I
> call it ActiveWhy for want of a better name...
>
> At the moment, when you download some code into your browser there are
> two possibilities. It might be Java, which is secure (to a greater or
> lesser degree) and crossplatform but slow, or it might be ActiveX which
> is insecure and proprietary but fast.
>
> An ActiveWhy control, however, is distributed as ANSI C source code and
> is automatically compiled by the browser using one of the freely
> redistributable C compilers. The resulting object file is then cached
> to speed up future accesses to the control. In addition, web site
> maintainers may, if they wish, include binaries for one or more
> platforms along with the source code. This will obviously make accesses
> to the control faster on those platforms while not ruling out the
> possibility of running the control on anything else.
>
> This gives us something like ActiveX but portable across platforms. Now
> we need security... Firstly it must be understood that unlike ActiveX
> and Java controls, ActiveWhy controls will always run in a separate
> process context. Under Linux, there will be a kernel module which will
> implement a new personality. This personality will deny the control
> access to any system calls which might be used to compromise security.
> Instead the control must perform all I/O through a pipe linked to the
> browser. The browser can then decide (using a scheme like Netscape's
> SecurityManager) whether to allow or deny a request.
>
> Under Windows this will not be possible (one of the drawbacks of
> proprietary kernels). Instead the control will be compiled to machine
> code for a simple yet efficient RISC processor. This code will then be
> interpreted.
>
> ActiveWhy controls, IMHO, will be useful in their own right; they
> provide a way of using the massive existing base of C code on the web in
> a secure way. Just as interesting, though, they provide a powerful
> incentive to browse the web through Linux rather than anything else...
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Pete Chown, email pc@skygate.co.uk, phone +44 (0) 181 680 8393,
> fax +44 (0) 181 680 8474, mobile +44 (0) 468 765 645,
> post 58 Foss Avenue, Croydon, CR0 4EU, England
>
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