Tim O'Reilly about network aware software

Tim O'Reilly wrote some thoughts about network aware software. Good sumup and nice ideas, why not only blogs should be net-aware (and where even blogs can be improved ;) )

"For the desktop, my personal vision is to see existing software instrumented to become increasingly web aware. It seems that Apple are doing a good job with this. (What does web aware mean for me? Being able to grok URIs, speaking WebDAV, and using open standard data formats.)" -- Edd Dumbill
I agree, but you do have to add Open Data Access formats (such as ODBC and to some degree JDBC) to this mix otherwise the you will need to create data for Open Standard Data Formats from sratch (tough for any enterprise irrespective of size).
Tim O'Reilly added the following items to Edd's list:

  • Rendezvous-like functionality for automatic discovery of and potential synchronization with other instances of the application on other computers. Apple is showing the power of this idea with iChat and iTunes, but it really could be applied in so many other places. For example, if every PIM supported this functionality, we could have the equivalent of "phonester" where you could automatically ask peers for contact information. Of course, that leads to guideline 2.

Another application is discovery of ODBC data sources, and database servers. Rendezvous can also simply security and administration of data sources accessible by either one of these standards data access mechanisms. It can also apply to XML databases and data sources exposed by XML Databases.

  • If you assume ad-hoc networking, you have to automatically define levels of access. I've always thought that the old Unix ugo (user, group, other) three-level permission system was simple and elegant, and if you replace the somewhat arbitrary "group" with "on my buddy list", you get something quite powerful. Which leads me to...
    • Buddy lists ought to be supported as a standard feature of many apps, and in a consistent way. What's more, our address books really ought to make it easy to indicate who is in a "buddy list" and support numerous overlapping lists for different purposes.
  • Every application ought to expose some version of its data as an XML feed via some well-defined and standard access mechanism. It strikes me that one of the really big wins that fueled the early web was a simple naming scheme: you could go to a site called www.foo.com, and you'd find a web server there. While it wasn't required, it made web addresses eminently guessable. We missed the opportunity for xml.foo.com to mean "this is where you get the data feed" but it's probably still possible to come up with a simple, consistent naming scheme. And of course, if we can do it for web sites, we also need to think about how to do it for local applications, since...

The very point I continue to make about Internet Points of Presence beingactual data acces points, in short these end points should be served by database serverprocesses. This is the very basis of Virtuoso, the inevitability of this realization remains the undepinings of this product. There are other products out there that have some sense of this vision too, but there is a little snag (at least so far in my research efforts), and that is the tendency to create dedicated independent server per protocol (an ultimate integration, administration, and maintenance nightmare).

  • We ought to be able to have the expectation that all applications, whether local or remote (web) will be set up for two-way interactions. That is, they can be either a source or sink of online data. So, for example, the natural complement to amazon's web services data feeds is data input (for example, the ability to comment on a book on your local blog, and syndicate the review via RSS to amazon's detail page for the book.) And that leads to:
  • We really need to understand who owns what, and come up with mechanisms that protect the legitimate rights of individuals and businesses to their own data, while creating the "liquidity" and free movement of data that will fuel the next great revolution in computer functionality. (I'm doing a panel on this subject at next week's Open Source Convention, entitled "We Need a Bill of Rights for Web Services.")
  • We need easy gateways between different application domains. I was recently in Finland at a Nokia retreat, and we used camera-enabled cell phones to create a mobile photoblog. That was great. But even more exciting was the ease with which I could send a photo from the phone not just to another phone but also to an email address. This is the functionality that enabled the blog gateway, but it also made it trivial to send photos home to my family and friends. Similarly, I often blog things that I hear on mailing lists, and read many web sites via screen-scraping enabled email lists. It would be nice to have cross-application gateways be a routine part of software, rather than something that has to be hacked on after the fact.
The wish list is pretty much a clear articulation of key items that should matter most to decision makers (CTOs and CIOs) ; in particular those that continue to wrestle with the identification and isolation of relevantcomponentsfor their enterprisearchitectures.