Back to the futur…mainframe, centralized computing anyone?
Thomas Menguy | October 25, 2006All this Ajax/Web 2.0/New Application Framework/Google are all about a big change in the CPU power repartition: Today PC is king, so CPU power is, defacto, at the network periphery…. But … as it was the case years ago, before the PC era, this power is coming back near the “center”, and this exellent article from Wired Magazine, found via Open-Gardens, depicts it pretty well:
The cloud architecture and mobile browsing applications ..
Wired 14.10: The Information Factories
A verbose wired article as per link above speaks of the ‘Internet cloud’. It can be summarised as
The desktop is dead. Welcome to the Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data you’ll ever use. George Gilder on the dawning of the petabyte age.
The cloud architecture and mobile browsing applications ..
And what to say about those Sun and Google “overnight datacenters” like mini-CPU power plants, autonomous, you put like vampire s(hum I disgress, I disgress) on the net backbone to bring computing/memory power anywhere:
Google’s Global Super-structure
Cringely breaks the silence on the rumors of a major Google innovation – worldwide datacenters in a box (actually a shipping container).
Got Ads?: Google’s Global Super-structure – Google AdWords and Overture PPC
At the end all of this may have a HUGE impact on mobile computing, quoting the last Mobile Opportunity entry about Smartphones and PC overlapp:
No, the realistic scenario is that PCs and smartphones (and other mobile devices to come) will prosper in parallel for years, each doing its own thing increasingly well. There will be some overlap at the edges, but the core usage of each product will remain very distinct. Meanwhile, the web apps platform will continue to gradually eat away at both operating systems, transforming them into commoditized plumbing that few people care about.
Mobile Opportunity: Will the smartphone kill the PC?
Yes I fully agree on this, and I share also the following point of view with Michael Mace:
The development tools for creating web apps, and the features of the web platform itself, are not currently as sophisticated and powerful as the traditional programming environments like Windows and Mac OS. So you can’t create a fully functional clone of Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop with the current state of the art in web tools. This is shielding the big software companies from immediate competition in their core businesses, and often produces a false sense of security.
However, the web platform is evolving much faster than the old-style operating systems. At some point it is inevitable that the web platform will become mature enough that web apps can challenge the established software standards. At that point, the swarming little web 2.0 application companies will fall all over themselves to take bites out of those lucrative franchises.
Rubicon Consulting, Inc. – Our Thinking – Newsletter – Understanding the full impact of the web
And this is precisely where I really see things evolving, see my post about those new “modern” frameworks. Some key elements are still missing, like micro formats, data standardization, behaviour abstraction for easy application deployment and mashup, but once reached the Holly Grail of complete uncorrelation between representation, control and data (hey MVC again), it could be possible to have applications written “in pieces”: I’m not an advocate of the “write once run everywhere”, in the Mobile space applications have to be so much taylored, adapted to the hardware, customizable and so on, that being able to have a common part, “written once, run on a server” and a customized one for each kind of device/Operator may be of high value…and those new frameworks may be the key (hum the beginning of the key to be exact ).
So next generation Mobile frameworks may have a very clean MVC abstraction, based on a standard that still doesn’t exist:
- The representation (View) should be optimized for the hardware, cause representation has to run locally. Javascript is not a good candidate, perhpas xml or even binary description are better suited
- The Control part is also really tied to the available user input/output and a part has to run locally
- The other part and the Data model should be of course on the server, with the big algorithms and processing
Of course everything will work smoothly if the network lag/answer time reduces greatly, but for sure it will come with next gen wireless networks.
A good example of such a modern application, appart from the today basic web 2.0 widgets, would be a Mapping/GPS appliction where the card and route computation are on the server and the data display and GPS infromation are on the device …hum Orange is already providing something like that with Webraska….let’s move on with other example! Do you have some? Any Comments?
Update: Thanks to AC/OS for the Sun data center link. Check those Sun prototypes…wow.
Update2: I’ve managed to found the article talking about google plan, looking like the Sun one.
[...] Elsewhere Scott Shaffer of the Pondering Primate Blog ponders
tarek speaks mobile… » Blog Archive » Carnival Of The Mobilists #51 | October 30, 2006[...] Elsewhere Scott Shaffer of the Pondering Primate Blog ponders whether Google could sell premium Keywords and link them to specific sites. Patrick Altoft at Mad4MobilePhones uses Googles new Co-op service to create a search engine for their Top 50 Mobile Websites. Tomi Ahonen at the Communities Dominate Brands weblog gives us a very indepth look at why Social Networking will become a “killer app” for 3G mobile. The guys at 66-Mobile give us an introduction to the new Nokia N95, the latest “Multimedia Computer” from the Finnish company. And finally we have Thomas Menguy whose piece from the Everything and The Mobile Software Universe takes a look at the importance of the mainframe to the mobile industry. [...]
I’m not an advocate of the “write once run everywhere”,
raddedas | October 31, 2006I’m not an advocate of the “write once run everywhere”, in the Mobile space applications have to be so much taylored, adapted to the hardware, customizable and so on, that being able to have a common part, “written once, run on a server” and a customized one for each kind of device/Operator may be of high value…
The problem for mobiles is, it’s almost always the UI and painting code which needs adapting, with the actual logic staying exactly the same – and for the kind of things you want to do on a mobile the logic is rarely all that intensive. So running the logic on a server achieves higher bandwidth usage (at a cost) with the same amount of handset tailoring (for most applications you’d want to do on a phone). If you needed to run a series of processor heavy image filters on a 5Mp photo and you sat on an HSDPA network with plenty of spare capacity I could see an advantage to outsourcing it to a server, but for a lot of things network latency will kill any advantage to the phone for the forseeable future.
Obviously for innately networked apps, dump everything on the server with the high capacity networking and just send display data to the client by all means, but the context from the quote was implying replacement of desktop apps… a good MVC separation ought to make the argument less relevant anyway, but good abstraction takes space and that’s another thing in short supply on mass market mobiles…
And yes, I shouldn't skim-read the end bit, obviously the
raddedas | October 31, 2006And yes, I shouldn’t skim-read the end bit, obviously the other great example where server-based processing works is when you rely on massive amounts of data like in mapping, which could rarely be stored on the phone – I’ll file that under “innately networked apps” for these purposes
Hi raddedas and thanks for the usefull comments. Yes true the
tmenguy | October 31, 2006Hi raddedas and thanks for the usefull comments.
Yes true the UI part is THE thing to be customized per device, as with data input.
Anyway many apps could have their data on a server : PIM , as I’ve mentionned mapping software, photos, etc…For sure it will be really possible if the network latency is reducing (see Gmail …), which won’t come tomorrow, but will happen sometime.
a good MVC separation ought to make the argument less relevant anyway, but good abstraction takes space and that’s another thing in short supply on mass market mobiles
Sure RAM and CPU constraints are key here (directly related top the phone cost) . Anyway for working (at Open-Plug) also on Ultra Low Cost phones, I really think that such an abstraction may be put in place even in this segment …. if it has been taylored from the ground with RAM and CPU in mind…and in those platefrom a “PIM on the server app” won’t come anytime soon
But for sure at the end I fully agree with you that some app are “innately networked apps” if it requires big data and/or shared data, and it is perhaps here that technology has to be matured to be more widespread…
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