Cloud Computing - The future

The advent of modern day web applications has begun with the introduction of Ajax. Earlier in the early nineties, all the data had to be processed at server and each resultant web page was delivered to the client as a static document. That was until Netscape introduced JavaScript, a client-sided scripting language, which added some dynamic elements to the user interface. A plug-in by macromedia called Flash Player, which is based on vector animation, enabled interactions on the client side through scripting. But it was not until the term Ajax (for ‘Asynchronous JavaScript and XML’) was coined, an increase in dynamic or interactive interfaces took place and applications like Gmail started to made client side more and more interactive. Google primarily pioneered this change with a variety of web applications like Google Docs, Gmail, Picasa, Google Maps et al. and with the introduction of their own browser Google Chrome, they emphasized the need for the rest to adapt to the changing scenario.

Let’s now give a thought to what the future might have in store for us and for this we’ll have to consider three things:
Cloud Computing – which is computing, via the Internet, that broadly shares computer resources instead of using software or storage on a local PC. This ‘Wikipedia’ definition is self-explanatory.
But for the sake of elaboration, let’s consider Google Docs. Google takes care of the entire Infrastructure and provides us a Platform through the Internet to access the Web Application. A user need not worry about the storage, software installation or hardware compatibility etc.
Web Applications – Due to the above mentioned reasons, there has been a dramatic increase in the quality and quantity of the web applications, most of them free and secure to access, during the last five years or so. Google Docs acts almost exactly like any of our office application and all we need to use it is a web browser and a personal computer system or any portable device that is capable of running a web browser. There has been a steady competition developing between the Desktop and Web Apps, a Visible split has been recorded among the users and it can be considered as a Paradigm Shift towards the latter.
Connectivity – The wired and wireless connectivity has improved manifold in terms of speed and security during the past few years. With better and faster Internet access combined with cheaper Memory, this has become a hot prospect in the industry. In fact, Google is planning to launch ultra-high speed Internet connections of over 1Gbps across a few trial locations this month in the US as part of an experimental study.
All the above considerations will lead to an important conclusion. We are now part of a phase transition. Most of the desktop applications we take for granted will soon be passe as once had been when hotmail took over the world.
There can be a day when your desktop will be full of shortcuts to web application links and the most important software, and maybe the only useful one, installed is a web browser. Be prepared for that.

Google Chrome

The Future of Web Applications



Google's entire business is people using a browser to access it and the web. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders, wanted a browser of their own, especially so as it'll be so aggressive a move to put them in the zone of their archrival Microsoft, which long ago crushed the most fabled browser of all, Netscape Navigator.
They could have got their wish long back if not for the opinion of the CEO Eric Schmidt that the company was not strong enough to withstand a browser war. He already was involved in the great browser war in the 90s as the CTO of Sun Microsystems, so he surely knows what it takes. As a kind of halfway house, Google sent a team to improvise firefox, the open source browser. Signing Darin Fisher and Ben Goodger, who had a stint with Mozilla, and Linus Upson, who previously worked at NeXT, as director of engineering proved as masterstroke by Page and Brin's part as it initiated a process that can have a huge impact on the future of how we perceive the web.
Yet, the rumors spread gradually that Google is building a browser of their own. With them, the idea persisted. The question but then was, if Firefox is working so brilliantly, slowly and steadily eating up the IE market, why do you need a new browser? According to Fisher, developing for Firefox was innovative enough to be amazing and they all loved Firefox.
But its not Firefox, its all the existing browsers that had a flaw in them. They were simple, browsing was previously less complex. Email, DBM, Spreadsheets, et al which were generic to the desktop, are being handled online more and more. Cloud Computing, sharing computer resources via web instead of from a PC, makes internet more than a content delivery agency but a platform in its own right.
By 2006, the Firefox team knew that they had to build a new application. Just an ecology of add-ons couldn't accommodate this concept. They would be broken when a new version is released and the whole process had to be dealt with every time this happens.
Since a browser is the linchpin of Web activity — the framework for our searching, reading, buying, banking, Facebooking, chatting, video watching, music appreciation — this is huge for Google, a step that needed to wait until the company had, essentially, come of age. It is an explicit attempt to accelerate the movement of computing off the desktop and into the cloud — where Google holds advantage.

And so when a two year top-secret project code-named Chromium resulted in a semi-accidental beta release of the browser Chrome on September 2 2008, it changed the internet game completely. Innovation was perceived in every aspect of it, even in the description of the browser's inner working as a thoughtful comic. Chrome had tabs, handles errors, and it was blindingly faster, it made Firefox 3 seem slower. But that's not all, it enhanced the concept of web application by allowing it to look and feel as a desktop application. At a touch of a button, Chrome makes a desktop, startmenu or quicklaunch shortcut for any web page or web application blurring the outline between what is online and inside a PC.

Let's now see how Chrome works...
Chrome is a bundle of four open source projects
Chrome: An internet OS. Chrome treats every tab like an OS treats an application. Each tab has its own protected memory, permissions and essentially works like an individual process. What if it misbehaves - open Chrome Task Manager, check the tabs processor and memory usage and shut it down - Simple.
It is more amazing if we imagine a system with multi core processor, each tab can render HTML and JavaScript independently on each processor. Revolutionary indeed. This is almost the same concept that earned fame for Win NT and XP. Protected memory is a value addition as it allows multithreading and stabilizes applications.
V8 JavaScript Engine: JavaScript, which was virtually interpreted earlier by moderate web browsers, will be compiled by V8 engine, essentially turning it into a real programming language. Now there is a possibility to enable rich - AJAX like - web apps without even using add-ons like Flash and SilverLight. And it runs blazingly fast too.
Gears: It adapts some HTML 5.0 standards and adds an offline element to surfing. Meant for web developers to design faster and powerful web apps.
Webkit: This third party rendering engine adds its top selling memory management konqueror boasted of and the speed. Works much better than Mozilla’s Gecko.

Google needed a browser to be redesigned from scratch to run its asynchronous web applications better. But by making it an open source project, Google proclaimed that its interest really lies in its online properties.
The Chrome release and the way it treats web pages as applications is so innovative, it might have jumped years ahead of iterative advances from current browser offerings. It changed the game.



References: wired.com; webmonkey, Google, Chrome, Chromium Blogs

Look out for the next part of this essay in my next blog
Web Applications and Cloud Computing