I’ve been pondering the idea of desktop applications authored as mashups. the question becomes – what is the development environment ? You can run PHP, Perl, and other languages on a local machine but they really were not meant for that.  You could install Apache and Tomcat and have an HTML and applet environment but that seems more like making your personal computer an Internet server. While either of these may become the norm, I think it might be something else. In reality, it will likely be something like widgets and gadgets running in a browser.

Adobe has another idea, the Adobe Integrated Runtime or AIR. Adobe says,

Adobe? AIR?, formerly code-named Apollo, is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to use their existing web development skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.

There are, of course, a number of other cross-platform runtimes including Java and Microsoft has announced it’s cross language runtime will become cross platform as well.

What is interesting about AIR is that it is attempting to use the web developer skills rather than those of the typical programmer. It might work, then again, it might not.

The more I think about it, the more I’d like to see a packaged install of Apache + Tomcat + MySQL + PHP + some helpful libraries. Oh, Wait …. that would be XAMPP !

 I stand fast with my technological point of view that no solution will succeed without having an established interface. I tend to leave some of Bill Gate’s creations out of the mix because monopolies don’t play by the same rules as the rest of the world. I’ll also eliminate very small niche software. These tend to do a very specific task and have a very specific audience. The down side of a niche product is it it can easily be replaced. For that reason, I’ll leave these out as well.

The interfaces can take on any number of implementations. Lotus 123 supports macros. Photoshop supports plugins. Google Maps has its a JavaScript API. MySQL can be accessed using PHP interfaces. IBM Lotus Connections uses REST. Other products leverage RSS, Atom, and publish AJAX and REST mechanisms. Continue reading ‘Software interfaces are sexy’ »