Future of the Web

Sun takes on the problem of interoperability and portability of applications in a world where there will be many many clouds. At the roll out of the Sun Cloud, key executives explain Sun's implementation of Open Cloud API's and what they see as a pressing need for management tools that will allow some standardization across clouds.

Sun's Open Cloud API plan is a clean reuse of existing Open Web API's.

"..... The underpinning of the Open Cloud Platform that Sun will be pitching to developers is a set of cloud APIs, the creation of which is focused under Project Kenai and which has been released under a Community Commons open source license. Sun wants lots of feedback on the APIs and wants these APIs to become a standard too, hence the open license. These APIs describes how virtual elements in a cloud are created, started, stopped, and hibernated using HTTP commands such as GET, PUT, and POST...."

"...... The upshot is that these APIs will allow programmatic access to virtual infrastructure from Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby and that means system admins can script how virtual resources are deployed. The APIs, as co-creator Tim Bray explains in his blog, are written in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), not XML. The Q-Layer software is a graphical representation of what is going on down in the APIs, and you can moving virtual resources into the cloud with a click of a mouse using the dashboard or programmatically using the APIs from those four programming languages listed above. (PHP support is not yet available, but will be)....."

I can see why Sun picked those four languages first. Can I assume that with a bit of work, this API will be usable from any language with a C "foreign function interface", such as Perl, Common Lisp, Bourne shell, Squeak Smalltalk, and others that your server application might be written in?

I read this comment that largely answers my question at: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/03/16/Sun-Cloud "So right now JSON out of a shell tool is not so good. More things like this will create pressure for development of tools to change that, but years of widespread XML/HTML deployment have only produced a few oddly maintained tools. Perhaps that's because you can scrape quite a bit of the web with a couple sed passes, and if I were to have to deal with the mentioned tools, that's probably the route I'd take." (seth w. klein) In other words, with a bit of work, _anything_ that can talk text over HTTP can do this with a bit of work, but an object-oriented is likely to be more at home with JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)

Excellent article on Cloud Computing and the need for an Open API from Dion Hinchcliffe. Solid analysis, deeply linked, with some good graphics: "....The final outcome of this struggle, as it's been in many earlier platform battles over personal computer hardware, operating systems, databases, and even the Web itself, will be the result of a fairly predictable and oft-repeated cycle of events (see diagram below) for which a small number of large winners are likely to emerge victorious...." "When we look back many years from now, it's probable that cloud computing will be regarded as both a momentous and major change of course in the history of software; many future computing platforms will be created and operated by what seemingly amount to utility companies. While this might seem like a boring future for computing, it's a necessarily pragmatic evolution as the very size and scope of modern software requires new economic models in order to remain cost effective. Virtually any online application these days has to scale to a few million users as quickly and inexpensively as possible....."

CMSWire has a brief explanation of RDFa and why it's important. RDFa is also finding it's way into the Drupal CMS, which could be a game changer. Timothy Berners-Lee vision of a "Semantic Web" where the meaning of content is understood by both humans and machines depends on the emergence of capable information systems that make it transparently easy to add semantic markup. I'm not surprised that Drupal is jumping with both feet.

"... In the march toward creating the semantic web, web content management systems such as Drupal (news, site) and many proprietary vendors struggle with the goal of emitting structured information that other sites and tools can usefully consume. There's a balance to be struck between human and machine utility, not to mention simplicity of instrumentation.

With RDFa (see W3C proposal),  software and web developers have the specification they need to know how to structure data in order to lend meaning both to machines and to humans, all in a single file. And from what we've seen recently, the Drupal community is making the best of it.

Acknowledgment from a Microsoft software architect that Microsoft's Azure cloud service is running atop "hundreds/thousands" of Windows Server 2008 and Hyper V instances, in other words, that Windows does not scale into the cloud. But no mention that Windows Server runs atop Solaris in the Microsoft data centers, although that was the point of the 2004 Technology Sharing Agreement with Sun.

Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher interviews Bill Coleman of VisiCorp-Sun-BEA fame with questions about the economy and disruptive technologies. Coleman references noted business guru Peter Drucker when he claims that a platform ill be successful if it has three characteristics. First, it has to be able to commoditize a market. Secondly, it has to obey the 10x better/cheaper rule - providing at least ten times the value of what it's displacing. And thirdly, a platform must allow you to add value with custom additions.

In the interview, Coleman backs up his assertions with bullseye examples. Clearly his passion is for Cloud Computing, especially the next generation.

......"As the cloud computing platform becomes more sophisticated, he predicts that there will be an acceleration in the use of the cloud driven by a "quadruple conversion." Video, audio, and IT data all become IP based, and productivity applications become integrated with social networks.

"As we move forward from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, all your productivity tools become integrated with your social networking, which becomes your business networking. Your mobile life and your online life will become the same. So now the client moves into the cloud and that's when we'll see a dramatic change in the cost structure of computing and of the capabilities you can have."....

Good interview. I hope Tom publishes the rest of the session soon.

James Gosling was asked an interesting question about the future of Java. Question: "if he had a magic wand and could change anything in the Java ecosystem (platform, language etc) what would it be? His answer was getting WebKit into the Java platform via JWebPane!

One can only hope that Java RiA can successfully the WebKit graphical interface and visual document model with the same multi-touch, multi-modal artistry as Apple's iPhone and Safari.

Adobe is similarly trying to enable the WebKit layout and visual document model in AiR. So far it's just ok. Based on the Flash-Flex runtime engine, AiR does have problems with multi-touch and multi-modal WebKit interface features. How Adobe deals with the inherent conflicts between canvas/JavaScript and Flash SWF also remains to be seen.

From AppScout: ... "For the third year in a row, leading minds from the major browsers got together at SXSW Interactive to spar with one another over issues like Web standards and openness. As in years past, Mozilla's Brendan Eich, Microsoft's Chris Wilson, Opera's Charles McCathieNevile, and moderator Arun Ranganathan (also from Mozilla) were present, and this year they were joined by Google's Darin Fisher.

As always, Apple was absent from the panel. Wilson told me that Apple is active in the standards discussion, but the company's famously closed corporate policy prevents Apple reps from participating in panels like this (almost every laptop I saw in the room was a Mac, so apparently the policy hasn't hurt them much). In any case, Safari's WebKit was represented by Chrome (Fisher), which is also built on WebKit....."

AppScout does a great job of collecting some of the best snippets to come out of this panel discussion. Really though, how can anyone have a browser discussion without edge of the Web WebKit device browsers? And then there's this: the discussions today isn't about "browsers". It's about RiA platforms and how browsers are used to launch rich internet applications. Microsoft has XAML-Silverlight. Adobe has AiR-WebKit-SWF. And the Open Web has WebKit-HTML+. That's the battle!

Fyrdility asks the question; when it comes to the future of the Open Web, is Apple worse than Microsoft? He laments the fact that Apple pushes forward with innovations that have yet to be discussed by the great Web community. Yes, they faithfully submit these extensions and innovations back to the W3C as open standards proposals, but there is no waiting around for discussion or judgement. Apple is on a mission.

IMHO, what Apple and the WebKit community do is not that much different from the way GPL based open source communities work, except that Apple works without the GPL guarantee. The WebKit innovations and extensions are similar to GPL forks in the shared source code; done in the open, contributed back to the community, with the community responsible for interoperability going forward.

There are good forks and there are not so good forks. But it's not always a technology-engineering discussion that drives interop. sometimes it's marketshare and user uptake that carry the day. And indeed, this is very much the case with Apple and the WebKit community. The edge of the Web belongs to WebKit and the iPhone. The "forks" to the Open Web source code are going to weigh heavy on concerns for interop with the greater Web.

One thing Fyrdility fails to recognize is the importance of the ACiD3 test to future interop. Discussion is important, but nothing beats the leveling effect of broadly measuring innovation for interop - and doing so without crippling innovation.

"......Apple is heavily involved in the W3C and WHATWG, where they help define specifications. They are also well-known for implementing many unofficial CSS extensions, which are subsequently submitted for standardization. However, Apple is also known for preventing its representatives from participating in panels such as the annual Browser Wars panels at SXSW, which expresses a much less cooperative position...."

Apple has posted an interesting page describing Safari technologies. Innovations and support for existing standards as well as the ACID3 test are covered.

Many people think that the Apple WebKit-Safari-iPhone innovations are pushing Open Web Standards beyond beyond the limits of "Open", and deep into the verboten realm of vendor specific extensions. Others, myself included, believe that the WebKit community has to do this if Open Web technologies are to be anyway competitive with Microsoft's RiA (XAML-Silverlight-WPF).

Adobe RiA (AiR-Flex-Flash) is also an alternative to WebKit and Microsoft RiA; kind of half Open Web, half proprietary though. Adobe Flash is of course proprietary. While Adobe AiR implements the WebKit layout engine and visual document model. I suspect that as Adobe RiA loses ground to Microsoft Silverlight, they will open up Flash. But that's not something the Open Web can afford to wait for.

In many ways, WebKit is at the cutting edge of Ajax Open Web technologies. The problems of Ajax not scaling well are being solved as shared JavaScript libraries continue to amaze, and the JavaScript engines roar with horsepower. Innovations in WebKit, even the vendor-device specific ones, are being picked up by the JS Libraries, Firefox, and the other Open Web browsers.

At the end of the day though, it is the balance between the ACiD3 test on one side and the incredible market surge of WebKit smartphones, countertops, and netbook devices at the edge of the Web that seem to hold things together.

The surge at the edge is washing back over the greater Web, as cross-browser frustrated Web designers and developers roll out the iPhone welcome. Let's hope the ACiD3 test holds. So far it's proving to be a far more important consideration for maintaining Open Web interop, without sacrificing innovation, than anything going on at the stalled W3C.

"..... Safari continues to lead the way, implementing

CIO Magazine has an extensive interview with Craig Mundie, the man responsible for nailing down the next generation of monopolist profits: "You talk about technology waves. What will be the next big wave? What happens in waves is the shift from one generation of computing platform to the next. That platform gets established by a small number of killer apps. We've been through a number of these major platform shifts, from the mainframe to the minicomputer to the personal computer to adding the Internet as an adjunct platform. We're now trending to the next big platform, which I call "the client plus the cloud."

That's one thing, not two things. Today, we've got a broadening out of what people call the client. My 16 years here was in large measure about that. And then we introduced the network. The Internet was a place where you had Web content and Web publishing, but other than being delivered on some of those clients, the two things were somewhat divorced.

The next thing that will emerge is an architecture that allows the application developer to think of the cloud plus the client architecturally as a single thing. In a sense, it is like client/sever computing in the enterprise. It was the homogeneity that existed between some of the facilities at the server and the client end that allowed people to build those applications. We've never had that kind of architectural homogeneity in this cloud-plus-client or Internet-plus-smart-devices world, and I'm predicting that will be the next big thing.

The race is on. Google will win the consumer Web. Microsoft will win the business Web. Sadly i don't think there is any way for Google to challenge Microsoft with regard for the privilege of transitioning existing MSOffice bound workgroup- workflow business processes to the Web. Even if Google Docs could match MSOffice feature to feature, cracking into existing MSOffice workgroups is impossibly hard. Anyone who doubts this ought to take a second look at the Massachusetts ODF Pilot Study, or the recently released Belgium Pilot results. Replacing MSOffice in a workgroup setting is simply too disruptive and costly because of the shared business process problem.

The NeuroCommons project seeks to make all scientific research materials - research articles, annotations, data, physical materials - as available and as useable as they can be. This is done by fostering practices that render information in a form that promotes uniform access by computational agents - sometimes called "interoperability". Semantic Web practices based on RDF will enable knowledge sources to combine meaningfully, semantically precise queries that span multiple information sources.

Working with the Creative Commons group that sponsors "Neurocommons", Microsoft has developed and released an open source "ontology" add-on for Microsoft Word. The add-on makes use of MSOffice XML panel, Open XML formats, and proprietary "Smart Tags". Microsoft is also making the source code for both the Ontology Add-in for Office Word 2007 and the Creative Commons Add-in for Office Word 2007 tool available under the Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) at http://ucsdbiolit.codeplex.com and http://ccaddin2007.codeplex.com,respectively.

No doubt it will take some digging to figure out what is going on here. Microsoft WPF technologies include Smart Tags and LINQ. The Creative Commons "Neurocommons" ontology work is based on W3C RDF and SPARQL. How these opposing technologies interoperate with legacy MSOffice 2003 and 2007 desktops is an interesting question. One that may hold the answer to the larger problem of re-purposing MSOffice for the Open Web?

We know Microsoft is re-purposing MSOffice for the MS Web. Perhaps this work with Creative Commons will help to open up the Microsoft desktop productivity environment to the Open Web? One can always hope :)

Dr Dobbs has the Microsoft - Creative Commons announcement; Microsoft Releases Open Tools for Scientific Research ...... Joins Creative Commons in releasing the Ontology Add-in

ptsefton continues his rant that OpenOffice does not support the Open Web. He's been on this rant for so long, i'm wondering if he really thinks there's a chance the lords of ODF and the OpenOffice source code are listening? In this post he describes how useless it is to submit his findings and frustrations with OOo in a bug report. Pretty funny stuff even if you do end up joining the Michael Meeks trek along this trail of tears. Maybe there's another way?

What would happen if pt moved from targeting the not so open OpenOffice, to target governments and enterprises trying to set future information system requirements?

NY State is next up on this endless list. Most likely they will follow the lessons of exhaustive pilot studies conducted by Massachusetts, California, Belgium, Denmark and England, and end up mandating the use of both open standard "XML" formats, ODF and OOXML.

The pilots concluded that there was a need for both XML formats; depending on the needs of different departments and workgroups. The pilot studies scream out a general rule of thumb; if your department has day-to-day business processes bound to MSOffice workgroups, then it makes sense to use MSOffice OOXML going forward. If there is no legacy MSOffice bound workgroup or workflow, it makes sense to move to OpenOffice ODF.

One thing the pilots make clear is that it is prohibitively costly and disruptive to try to replace MSOffice bound workgroups.

What NY State might consider is that the Web is going to be an important part of their informations systems future. What a surprise. Every pilot recognized and indeed, emphasized this fact. Yet, they fell short of the obvious conclusion; mandating that desktop applications provide native support for Open Web formats, protocols and interfaces!

What's wrong with insisting that desktop applciations and office suites support the rapidly advancing HTML+ technologies as well as the applicat

Chris Walker provides some interactive demonstrations of the powerful webkit-transforms that are placed in CSS. So, what can we do with all this magic? Well, the culmination of the Chris Walker demo is a Mac OSX style Dock menu, using no Javascript...

".....Yes, that's right a bulging docked menu, with no javascript. Just so you remember, there no javascript in the demo. Check out the Javascript free OSX Dock Menu Demo.

This demo actually proves an important point Tom Yager made earlier about Ajax; Will JavaScript inconsistencies break the Web?

Taking AJAX literally makes lousy Web apps: "As little as possible should be the rule for JavaScript, which must play a supporting role to CSS and HTML". Tom concludes that it's best to follow the WebKit model, putting everything possible into first CSS4, then HTML5, and then JavaScript. I would argue that the proliferation of JavaScript libraries is a good hedge against the non interoperable future Yager warns of. But hey, why stop the guy when he's on a roll. CSS4! I guess the webkit-transforms have been officially christened. Thanks Tom.

~ge~

InfoWorld's Tom Yager makes the case for the WebKit visual document model over AJAX. The problem with AJAX as he sees it is that it's JavaScript heavy. And that breaks precious Web interoperability. He makes the point that if something can be done in CSS, it should. He also argues that WebKit is the best tool because the document model is that of advanced HTML5 and CSS3.

"... These [WebKit] browsers also share a stellar accelerated JavaScript interpreter that makes the edit/run/debug cycle go faster. They are also the only browsers that deliver on CSS4 and HTML5 standards (with some elements that are proposed to the W3C standards body). Sites that are visually rich may start sprouting "best viewed with Safari" banners until other browsers catch up. The banner would also let users know that your site is optimized for iPhone....."

Humm. Did you catch that? CSS4!!! I guess he's referring to the WebKit penchant for putting advanced graphical transitions and animations into CSS instead of relying on a device specific or OS specific API.

Placing the visual interface instructions in the documents presentation layer (CSS4) is a revolutionary idea. The WebKit model will go a long way towards creating a global interoperability layer that rides above lower device, OS, browser and application specifics. So yes, by all means let's go with CSS4 :)

Gary Edwards (URL) said: Mar. 05, 8:17 PM +1 Chrome! It's excellent, but not for the reasons most would insist are important. Neither is Chrome a disruptive technology. It's not. The real revolution is underneath Chrome in the open source WebKit engine. An engine shared with iPhone, Android, Safari, Palm Pre, Nokia, Iris, RiMM 's Blackberry Storm and KDE. Crossplatform WebKit IDE's now include QT, 280Atlas and Eclipse. It is the Apple iPhone that put WebKit on the map, demonstrating a revolutionary document/application model capable of leveraging and pushing the Open Web to be competitive with proprietary initiatives from Adobe and Microsoft. The WebKit engine is driving most of the smart devices at the edge of the Web, providing a consistent document rendering and application runtime layer that is highly visual, multi-dimensionally interactive, and fully competitive with the proprietary rich interactive application engines (RiA) provided by Adobe and Microsoft. Near 80% of these edge of the Web devices are based on WebKit.

Google's goal? To set up a cloud-based set of Windows file-compatible applications that will work hand-in-glove with Google Linux-powered desktops. Google already has the applications: Google Docs, GMail, Google Calendar, etc. etc. Now, just add an operating system where they, and not the boys from Redmond, call the shots, and they're in business.

Coursey challenges the assertions put forward by Stephen Vaughn-Nichols that Google's Android will appear as a netbook OS before the year is out. Stephen also contends that soon enough, an Android Desktop will appear, and this will truly challenge Microsoft's monopolist grip. Coursey disputes that also, pointing out the need for file format compatibility and cloud synchronization before this can happen. Obviously, he does not see Microsoft easing their iron grip over the MSOffice productivity environment anytime soon. Stephen counters with the SAMBA story, claiming that the EU will continue to force integration and interop concessions from Microsoft. My take is that both commentators are missign the revolution that is taking place at the edge of the Web ::: the WebKit dancing document/application revolution that includes both iPhone and Android. The WebKit document/app model is washing back over the greater Web, with Web designers and masters upgrading their Web pages to reach the revolution at the edge. This is the big change Coursey is so unaware of.