Douglas Crockford on Google Gears and the Mashup Problem

Douglas Crockford is always an interesting speaker. At AjaxWorld last week he gave a talk about the good parts (there are a few) and the bad parts (there are many) of the current JavaScript standard. (That talk was similar to this Yahoo! Video of the Keynote from the 2006 Konfabulator Developer Day).

My favorite pearl of wisdom from that talk: The best thing about JavaScript is that there have been no new design mistakes since 1999 (when spec was last updated).

In addition to being highly knowledgeable (Brendan Eich called him the Yoda of Lambda Programming and JavaScript, he “discovered” JSON) he’s also entertaining, funny, and thought provoking.

In this video, after about 10-12 minutes of broad background on why the fundamental nature of security on the web is broken, he dives into the specific problem of mashups, the same origin policy in JavaScript, the global namespace and shared DOM, and suggests a method for using Google Gears to craft a solution.