Contact Us
Feeds and Other Blogs
Writely Blog Archives
Writely Quick Note Bookmarklet Sam
12.13.2005 [0 comments] - Permalink The Rise of the Mammals Sam
12.12.2005 [1 comments] - Permalink
I stole the title - it's from Michael Mace's posting here. This is very well put, and is something we've been thinking about for a while at Writely.
I'll add one thing to the mix - in the days of OpenDoc, etc, integration was at the level of programming languages, which are typically very brittle and hard to deal with.
One of the things that's really different in the web world is that we're starting to componentize, as Michael put it, at the level of metadata - formats like SOAP, RSS, XML, REST (well, that's not a format, but you get the idea), are not just language independent but platform, country, network, etc independant. Think about the difference between working with a web service versus a COM object. Think about how hard it would have been to develop an app on top of Google maps, if you had to write COM code and get it ported to the mac and linux...who would have bothered? It's much easier to do something that just...works....across all kinds of localized, mac/win/linux systems. Like it or not, XML, JavaScript, JSON, AJAX and the rest are really, actually, finally, systems that can be used to reach a really broad number of users with minimal hassle.
I think this is what's really amazing about the current situation, and it's what reminds me of "Web 1.0", when it was suddenly apparent that the combination of HTML and TCP/IP was a really, really powerful global publishing and communication mechanism. As a salty old desktop developer, it's thrilling.
Anyway, an interesting read, I think, even if we are mentioned in it. :)
12.13.2005 [0 comments] - Permalink The Rise of the Mammals Sam
12.12.2005 [1 comments] - Permalink
I stole the title - it's from Michael Mace's posting here. This is very well put, and is something we've been thinking about for a while at Writely.
I'll add one thing to the mix - in the days of OpenDoc, etc, integration was at the level of programming languages, which are typically very brittle and hard to deal with.
One of the things that's really different in the web world is that we're starting to componentize, as Michael put it, at the level of metadata - formats like SOAP, RSS, XML, REST (well, that's not a format, but you get the idea), are not just language independent but platform, country, network, etc independant. Think about the difference between working with a web service versus a COM object. Think about how hard it would have been to develop an app on top of Google maps, if you had to write COM code and get it ported to the mac and linux...who would have bothered? It's much easier to do something that just...works....across all kinds of localized, mac/win/linux systems. Like it or not, XML, JavaScript, JSON, AJAX and the rest are really, actually, finally, systems that can be used to reach a really broad number of users with minimal hassle.
I think this is what's really amazing about the current situation, and it's what reminds me of "Web 1.0", when it was suddenly apparent that the combination of HTML and TCP/IP was a really, really powerful global publishing and communication mechanism. As a salty old desktop developer, it's thrilling.
Anyway, an interesting read, I think, even if we are mentioned in it. :)