Keebler/Blog

WARNING: This blog entry is super geeky. Proceed only if you know what an “elastic computing cloud” is

This article is a little older, but I was blown away when I saw it. The Enomaly Open Source Consulting group has been able to get Windows Server 2003 running on the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud. I hadn’t heard of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (“EC2″) until the other day, but it’s almost as amazing as their S3 storage offering.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction.

Supporting only *nix operating-systems initially, it was a challenge for EC2 to support Windows Server. However, Enomaly was able to run Windows Server via the processor emulator QEMU. They then packaged the image into an AIM (a EC2 computing image) running the Windows Server 2003 trial. From there, you can put your own Windows license onto the server, Remote Desktop in, and away you go!

Some nights, I’m just blown away by what some developers are able to achieve. Elastic computing clouds, attached to unlimited bandwidth, provides a massively scalable architecture on which to build complex web applications that scale effortlessly. Akamai’s content delivery network is about to look very antiquated

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m a big fan of the feature-set being developed by the people at Mojiti. I’ve started following their blog, and today they added another innovative feature: community translation. They’ve provided an interface for users to translate all the text on the site (1117 phrases) from English to one of 31 languages. Once all the translations are made for a particular language, they roll it out on the site.

For an international site like Mojiti (who doesn’t love watching guys being hit in the groan with footballs in any language ), this sounds like a great way to grow your traffic and attract a much broader audience. ASP.NET makes displaying multiple languages pretty straight forward with built-in globalization features using resource files.

Once again, nice job Mojiiti! I translated some French for you

A while back I posted my manifesto for a “dynamic web-browser”, a custom operating-system application for web-applications. Apparently Adobe heard me (or rather, they already had this under development years ago) because today they launched an alpha of their new Apollo runtime. They even promoed an Ebay application that works very much like my fictional Amazon application.

The alpha SDK is really rough around the edges (I’m staring at the unpacked files wondering what the hell I’m supposed to do with them — PLEASE, someone post a nice tutorial ), but there’s a lot of promise there. Especially if it gives web-developers a more natural foray into the operating-system.

Still though, I think they ripped me off

Adobe Labs – Apollo

Apollo is the code name for the much hyped Adobe cross-operating system. It allows developers to build RIA (Rich Internet Applications) for the desktop, using the development platform of their choice. A key value proposition of the new technology, according to Adobe, is the ability for developers to create desktop applications in a fraction of the time they’re used to. Using Apollo developers can build applications using HTML, JavaScript, Flash, Flex and Ajax. Adobe’s goal is to redefine the Internet application and how it interacts with the browser – and vice-versa. (source)

We got into a (2 1/2 hour) discussion at work today about the direction of our next project. While thinking about how we can push the boundaries of what a website can do, it really struck me how limiting working within a traditional web-browser is. The web-browser really is a compromise. You can build whatever application you want, style it however you want, show whatever content you want, as long as you are happy to stay within the square-box of the browser window.

Well, I’m tired of working within the square-box! Maybe Joost-like software isn’t such a crazy idea. It’s a “web” application (in this case, a video player that streams videos off the web) that has all the benefits of a Windows application: faster response times, dynamic interfaces that Ajax could only dream of, and a window that they can skin and control 100%.

Whereas, web-applications like “broadband video players” try their best to simulate a window (small “w” — could be on a Mac or Linux) program, they are constrained by the square-box and can never match the single-task-ness of a window application.

However, the beauty of the web-browser is the flow between websites using hyperlinks. “Surfing the web” is a flow through many webpages on many websites. While the interfaces for the individual websites may change, you can still navigate easily between them.

So here is what I propose: keep the hyperlinks, keep the “flow”, ditch the square-box. Instead of having a web-browser wrap around the interfaces of each website, let the websites skin the browser itself. I’m talking about more than merely switching themes and colours. What if the web-browser application could be turned into a custom application for each website? When you go to Google, your web-browser takes on the shape and configuration that makes it easiest to search. When you follow a link to Amazon, your web-browser morphes into a shopping configuration. Going to office.microsoft.com could turn your web-browser into Word, or Powerpoint, or Excel. Existing websites, without these dynamic skins, could even revert to the square-box configuration for backwards-compatibility.

A dynamic web-browser like this would break-down the lines between websites and (installed) applications. With all the power of the web for sharing and communicating, and all the power of an application for speed and interface, it would bring together the windowed environment, with the online world in new an exciting ways.

Because of the nature of the web, I’m sure someone is already working on this application. If anyone wants to give me some VC, I’ll build it myself Just a thought