[Sigia-l] The new face of web info

[alex wright]

Ziya pointed out two great examples of browser-less Internet
applications (note I didn't say "Web" applications), the likes of which
I expect we'll be seeing much more in the months ahead.

With the advent of new development environments (like Bowstreet,
Kenamea, Sun's Jax, and IBM's Sash), coupled with simplified protocols
like SOAP and XML-RPC, we may be on the verge of a major shift away from
traditional client-server Web development - what I like to call the
Monolithic Era of Web Design - to a far more fluid environment of
distributed networked services.

For IAs, this amounts to a Big Deal because over time we will see the
decline of the centralized Web site or application, and the rise of
networked ecosystems, where specialized applications stitch together
networked services using simple descriptive tags (rather than requiring
custom programming hooks from a central app server).  More importantly,
Web services will open the door to all kinds of special-purpose
lightweight applications suited to particular kinds of user interaction,
gradually loosening the hegemony of the Web browser.

Another good example of a Mac-based Web services app is Earthbrowser
(www.earthbrowser.com), a nifty little geographical browser tool that
pulls together meteorological and geographical data from a variety of
different networked sources.

A couple of other examples that come to mind are the new RealPlayer,
which does a nice job of adapting different browser UI components into a
multimedia viewer application.  Also worth a look are IBM's Sash
environment
(http://sash.alphaworks.ibm.com) and Kenamea (http://www.kenamea.com) -
both sites have a few good demos, but you'll have to install their
runtimes first.  Bowstreet is also an important player in this area.

I wrote a white paper on more-or-less this subject last year, entitled
"The Client Executable," if anyone's interested: 

http://www.agwright.com/writing/client_executables.pdf

(unfortunately this paper is about a year old, and starting to show its
age.  If I were writing it today, I would include coverage of Flash MX,
among other things).

- a.

regards,
alex
-------------
alex wright
alex at agwright.com | www.agwright.com