[Isolate-interest] shared heap between isolates?

[Bill Foote]

Curt Cox wrote:

> Please, tell us more of this dubious past.
> What is the web browser in question?

JavaSoft's HotJava, may it rest in peace.

> Can you provide more implementation details?

There were none.  Sun's JDK 1.2.x had a sun.misc class
(EmbeddedFrame?) that did some of the easier things, but
it certainly had nothing like Isolates to build on.

The HotJava experience helped define what the problem
is.  It didn't, alas, drive a solution in any sort of
committed-to-product-roadmap sense.  That came after
HotJava had moved on to a better place, or at least
had been kicked to the curb.

> I strongly agree that this should be part of the platform.
> 
> I think that there is a tendency to view this as a very specialized
> feature that would only benefit web browsers.  In reality, many
> programs have a need to surrender some gui space to code that
> shouldn't really be trusted.  I develop one.  jEdit is another example.
> Any program that supports some kind of plug-in would benefit.

Agreed.

There's actually a standard for an area called Interactive
TV that requires just this kind of plug-in:  MHP 1.1.1, available
at www.mhp.org.  It doesn't have a normative requirement that
it be based on isolates, however.  Anyway, this is just more
anecdotal evidence that there's a real need to embed a widget
in one isolate inside a hierarchy from another.

I think this needs comes up more in the J2ME space
and on the desktop.  I guess that's kind of obvious,
in that that's where GUIs come up more, but what I mean
is this:  Isolate has to scale to network clusters architectures
and other massively parallel computing environments, but it's
sensible to limit embedded widgets to only isolates running
on the same "machine."  Precisely defining "machine" might
be a bit of a challenge.

Bill

> 
> - Curt  
> 
> 
> 
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