From Libraries to Platforms

We, as web developers, are living in a maelstrom of innovation today. There are literally hundreds of frameworks and libraries out there for us to choose from. They range from the low level abstractions to the complete deal... from javascript sweetness to tools aimed at people who don't want to learn javascript. What's happening now, though, is we are seeing quite a bit of code and concept overlap. It is very common to find the same components in different frameworks. Novel innovations seem to be coming a little farther apart than they once were. This means the dam is about to break on the next stage (and indeed, the precursors are here already). Enter, the platform.

The platforms, as opposed to the frameworks and libraries, will be complete end-to-end development, collaboration, integration, publishing/distribution, searching, and monetization engines. The truly good ones will be easy and powerful enough to enable a level of user created content never before seen, or imagined. The truly great ones will do so while being secure, and will see enterprise adoption relatively early. From people at home, to that famous "line of business" person, everyone will be equipped to implement their ideas.

The content will be in the form of compelling functionality mixed with compelling data and wrapped in nice looking - and yes compelling - presentation. Moreover, these widgets will be like mutable little Lego(tm) blocks. You will be able to extend them, and plug them together to create new, larger, or specialized versions and re-publish as your own. The incredibly awesome platform will enable this re-authoring, and will be seamless. It will wrap licensing automation, making sure the "mashup engineers" get their fair share for being innovators (doing something that the original author never imagined), and that the original author gets their fair share for, well, being the original author. Creating value for the community you're in will be rewarded.

The true web platform will transcend server-centric vs. client-centric programming models. Developers (or rather, idea implementers) on this new breed of platform will be doing web-centric development. Processing, storage, database, hosting and deployment concerns will all be abstracted away to a "pluggable provider model" that will be as easy to change as checking a box. The ideas and the communities that arise around those ideas are what will matter. The implementations will be largely interchangeable, and most certainly extensible.

The complete platform will provide an infrastructure on which to build upon. It will include a widget to widget communication system, and here's the catch: that communication system will work the same for widgets within the same page (or application space) as well as for widgets being used in completely different contexts, in different applications, on different computers, in different parts of the world, and across spans of time. This messaging will be orchestrated, secure and reliable.

That brings me to the disclaimer: I have special insider knowledge of this whole platform direction because I am part of the team that has been designing one of them. It has been this effort over the past 2 years, on top of meeting the ongoing and demanding needs of our clients, that has largely kept me from blogging about these ideas. But now I feel the time has come to let the world know what we've been up to.

Look forward to hearing more about our company, the partnerships we're forging, the technology we've developed and are evolving, and the ideas we will be implementing. You will be able to start seeing little pieces coming out from the following domains (some are parked for now, but expect to see more news in the coming months).

The platforms are coming, and ours will be:

• www.WebWidgetry.com - We will be putting the front end community discovery and sharing tools here (think YouTube, but for solutions/widgets/ideas/services/mashups/creations/etc...)
• www.MashupStudio.com - You will be able to author, collaborate, find, integrate, publish, license, develop, test, share and use creations here.
• www.WidgetsAndMashups.com - The blogs of our team members (including a new location for this blog of course), as well as the discussion forums and other communication tools will be located here.
• www.EnterpriseWidgets.com - Enterprises will be able to access reliable, secure tools here to leverage this new platform with both ease of use and ease of mind.
• www.QAMachine.com - You will be able to submit your "idea implementations" here, where a community of testers will put it through the tests. It will come out the other side donning a shiny certification and rating, proving that it conforms to a set of standards for security, performance and reliability.
• www.GlobalServiceBus.com - No platform will be complete without the ability to connect pieces together outside the normal confines of an "application". We will expose the best principles of the enterprise service bus, but at the global level, and intuitively.

Technorati Tags: web3.0 web2.0 ajax ria platform widgets mashups enterprise "idea implementation"

-Ryan Gahl
I work as a professional software engineering consultant, specializing in web-based (inter/intra/extranet) applications, Ajax, and C#. My services can be purchased by calling the following number: 1-262-951-6727
I am becoming an expert engineer.