Pbo

The party is over my friends :)

Classic!

This was very surprising to me. I definitely would not have thought JavaScript would have went down in position. With server side JS starting to take shape, this might change for next year, but still thought it would have had more of an impact. My guess is that Objective-C w/ iOS is taking more and more share away from JS. I have noticed many frontend engineers seeing this environment as being more and more appealing. Also surprised to see Python's rise. I think that's great, as Python is definitely a language I would like to learn more about and play around with, and would love to see more job opportunities in.

Prototype of an Open Web App Ecosystem

Posted by jsullivan

October 19th, 2010 · Mozilla Labs

The open Web is a great platform for rich applications. It would be even better if it had additional capabilities to ease discovery, acquisition, installation and use of apps, while also enabling monetization for developers. We designed and built a prototype of a system for open Web apps: Apps built using HTML/CSS/JavaScript that work both on computers and mobile phones, have many of the characteristics that users find compelling about native apps and provide developers with open and flexible distribution options.

Today, we are releasing technical documentation of the proposed system and a developer preview prototype that allows you to install, manage and launch Web apps in any modern desktop or mobile browser (Firefox 3.6 and later, Firefox for mobile, Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 6, Safari 5, Opera 10 and WebKit mobile). This prototype provides a simple mechanism to support paid apps and authentication features to allow apps to log users in upon launch.

The design proposed here provides the following capabilities and enables a new category of what we call “Open Web Apps” — apps that are truly of the Web.

Open Web Apps:

• Are built using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
• Can be “installed” to a dashboard within your mobile or desktop Web browser, or to your native OS desktop or mobile home screen.
• Work in all modern Web browsers, while enabling each browser to compete on app presentation, organization and management user interfaces.
• Support paid apps by means of an authorization model that uses existing identity systems like OpenID.
• Support portable purchases: An app purchased for one browser works in other browsers, and across multiple desktop and mobile platforms without repurchase.
• Can request access to one or more advanced and/or privacy-sensitive capabilities that they would like access to (like geolocation) which the system will mediate, giving the user the ability to opt-in to them if desired.
• Can be distributed by developers directly to users without any gatekeeper, and distributed through multiple stores, allowing stores to compete on customer service, price, policies, app discoverability, ratings, reviews and other attributes.
• Can receive notifications from the cloud.
• Support deep search across apps: Apps can implement an interface that enables the app container (generally the Web browser) to provide the user with a cross-app search experience that links deeply into any app that can satisfy the search.

Check out this demo to see more about our Open Web App prototype:

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Please join us in exploring this Open Web App concept. Head over to the Mozilla Labs forum, leave a comment here and follow the Mozilla Labs blog for updates. As with everything Mozilla does, we’re developing this prototype and design for the public benefit in the open and we look forward to making this concept a reality.

Open Web App Ecosystem FAQ

| Comments (32)

This is a fascinating article and must read for all your web developers out there. True that other companies have implemented some of these ideas, but the key here is open. Yes, Apple's app store does this and with great success, but... APPLE OWNS AND CONTROLS IT.

Should be interesting to see where this goes, and hopefully more developers jump on the bandwagon instead of deciding its cooler to just make an iPhone app.

When I started Zoolu Web, I had to make a similar choice of what language would we use to build our platform.  Right before we started, Zoolu Web was actually going to consist of 3 developers and 1 graphic designer. We decided to go with Python for the reason explained in this article. However, when push came to shove, and by the time Zoolu Web got off the ground, the company consisted of little ole me.  Which really meant I had no time to waste learning a new language, so the choice seemed clear: PHP.

Looking back I would still choose PHP again, I mean hey, we finally got namespaces, but honestly the PHP community can be a bit frustrating. There are a lot of amazing people and developers out there, but with them comes an even larger pool of people who have no standards, no understanding of computer science, and quite frankly don't care. I can't tell you how many times I have purchased a few scripts only to find out it was a spaghetti's addict wet dream.  Like this article says, sometimes a choice of what language you choose can determine the type of programmers you attract. So although I would still choose PHP, especially for doing local sites and with simple easy to use cms's like Wordpress and Joomla!, I wonder, what would it have been like if I had gone with Python.

Anyway, check out this article for good write up on the subject.

wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-5.rpm
rpm -Uvh remi-release-5*.rpm epel-release-5*.rpm

Been a todo of mine for awhile, so I figured what better to do on an early Saturday morning then install PHP 5.3 on my vm. The two most obvious features I'm excited to start playing around with are Namespaces and Closures.

That being the case, found this article, which made installation a breeze... so what are you waiting for...

UPDATE: Upgrade to 5.3 complete!  w00t!

Congrats to the team at Zend and the community of developers, well done!

Where did the idea of the internet come from? Checkout this timeline from Online MBA which covers a visual history of the internet.