Web apps/services
In all the hubbub, I think the real definition of Web 2.0 has gotten lost… Don’t you see? It’s about REALLY BIG type. Oh, and bright colors ;)
Web Application Solutions: A Designer’s Guide is a nice comparison of different web app technologies of varying “thicknesses.”
From the mind of Steven Johnson (by way of Rael Dornfest) comes a nifty Google-based metric: Googleshare. And here’s another version of the app which doesn’t require you to have a Google API key.
Self-Service Web Applications: Less Cost, More Value offers thoughtful and practical rules of thumb for companies hoping to use the Web to reduce customer relations costs.
Web Services, Part I: Introduction… If you thought it was bad using web apps and having them be slow and/or down for maintenance just when you needed them, imagine what it’s going to be like debugging your code when it’s strewn all over the internet. (don’t get me wrong, I like the impulse a lot, but here there be monsters).
A Web Services Primer is technical, but sketches the landscape of the emerging distributed web services model and for some reason makes me want to sing: “I’m a service. She’s a service. Wouldn’t you like to be a service, too.”
Probably shouldn’t admit this, but I can’t remember if I ever linked to A Young Person’s Guide to The Simple Object Access Protocol: SOAP. [via cam]
This is old, but O’Reilly has a good rant about Web APIs: Meerkat: An Open Service API. Here’s a quote from Brian Behlendorf (think Apache):
I think it’s fine to have a world where open and closed source software speak—by far the most important thing is that the protocols and APIs be stable and open and free from encumberance, that the software source code is open is secondary.
Desktop.com has some usability problems, but they’re publishing their API. Neat.
Activespace is a database web app which allows you to design databases. It seems to be a bit more templated than Desktop, but they let you export data to halfbrain which is rad. When we get data flying back and forth between many apps, with RPCs and all, thing’s start to get interesting.
IBM: Web Application Client Programming Model.. A bit specific at times, but a nice overview of the web app framework (via cam).
There’s been a whole lot of discussion of web app security issues lately.
Here’s the SOAP spec on msdn.
CHI-WEB: summary of the web apps special interest group from CHI 2000.
I’ve been trying to pin down a definition of “web applications.” What exactly makes something a web app? Is it that:
- it’s made out of web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript? (SASH? Dreamweaver?)
- it speaks web protocols like HTTP or FTP? (Dreamweaver? Fetch?)
- it lives on the network? (an X server? Thinkfree?)
Or, is some combination necessary? Blogger, for example, is made of HTML, speaks FTP, and lives on the network, so I’m pretty sure it counts. Are two of three enough? (Or should I just leave it at “web pages that do stuff” and get on with my life?)
Designing interfaces for online apps, I keep thinking about the confusion between where the browser ends and the application begins (or between a site’s meta navigation links and its application functionality). How can designers convey the difference between a web page and a web application?
Well, I asked about popping open new windows with no controls on CHI-Web and got a thoughtful post in favor of new windows and a thoughtful argument against ‘em.
Here’s an article on designing navigation for web apps and one on the tension between web and desktop which I found on this list of information architecture resources, which was on eatonweb (via blah blah blah…).
Scripting pointed to this SOAP—WebServices Resource Center.
Casbah—Open Source Application Framework.. umm, I thought Mozilla was an open source application framework. The funny thing is that Mozilla started as a browser and became a platform, and Casbah started as a content management system and became a platform. But we all know that platforms are only as good as their distribution. (via captain cursor).
Via peterme, The Elements of User Experience (PDF), a sweet chart exploring the tension between “Web as software interface” and “Web as hypertext system,” which also gives a nice theoretical map of the different types of work involved in user experience design. Thinking about the app-hypertext tension makes me think we, as users, have a lot of unlearning to do (e.g. unlearn that you have to be really careful before clicking on a link because it’ll take a long time to download the next page).
With a link to the misery of web applications on tweney.com, Mark Hurst more or less ridicules the notion of web apps. I think both of them have some really good points (Yes, the internet is too slow). And I definitely appreciate the hype-deflating impulse, but I also think they’re being kinda reactionary. These are all soluble problems, so stop complaining and start solving! (God, did I just say that? I better go drink some Kava).
ps—one of the keys to all this is data storage for web apps.
It’s great when people do your work for you.. Captain Cursor linked to SOAP on a ZOPE, which, indeed, includes lots of good XML-RPC links. I actually don’t think it’s that hard to think of useful applications for this stuff (although they always seem to involve Yahoo calendar).. what I want to see is an explanation of how we’re going to convince companies whose sole business model is making money off their users’ data to open that data up to their competitors. In response to this question, Dave Winer suggested to me that non-web developers who had proprietary file formats back in the day probably said the same thing. But they were selling software, not the data itself. Am I missing something here? Or will users simply demand interoperability and force the market to deal with it.
Here’s Dave Winer on What is a Web Application?.
But, um, what is a web app? The definition starts becoming impossibly broad.. is all that separates a “web” app from a traditional app the fact that it’s based on a markup language? Is it that it speaks http?
The exciting things to me about “web apps” are:
- They’re free ;)
- They are accessible to many authors. By opening application development to non-C-coders, we inevitably increase the pace of interface innovation (heh.. so we can have lots of Buffy the Vampire Slayer skins all over our apps ;)
- They are standards-based so that I can access them from most anywhere.
- They are “of” the net. In other words, they let me do things I couldn’t do with non-networked apps.
The interesting thing about that second point is that really all I care about is having my data on the network (and in an open format). That’s why I see xdrive as much more useful than halfbrain even though it’s ostensibly more limited and why I really like the idea of an XML-RPC-accessible world.
OK, so “web apps” is now officially a buzzword. Everybody is talking about web apps.. (er, including me ;)
More on getting web applications to talk to each other: XML Inter-Application Protocols. I can’t wait for this stuff to take off.
OK, so I’m using blogger to manage posts to this site, and Atomz to add search and they are both really great tools (and free!) and I can manage the site from anywhere because they’re web-based, BUT I have to go to multiple sites with multiple logins and multiple templates and make sure I keep track of changes. I’d love to see some integration/standardization, perhaps using XML-RPC, so either I could control both sites through a Dreamweaver extension (as taylor suggested to me) or somehow, the sites could figure out a way to work together (picture the cobranding opportunities!).
Maybe I’m being short-sighted but I just don’t see The promise of an Internet-based office suite. While some of the implementations are impressive (whoever coded the halfbrain DHTML spreadsheet is insane!), I just don’t see the point. The important thing, as far as I can figure, is a combination of open file formats and online data storage such as i-drive.
I think the really interesting web interface challenge these days is designing web apps. Andrew Wooldridge is a smart guy at Netscape who maintains a log of web applications. As you’d expect, some are more interesting than others (if not more useful).
XUL: XML-based User-interface Language.. Basically, all the chrome in Mozilla is constructed using XML, CSS, script. The weird thing is this breaks OS-level consistency. Among the cool things is that you can build multiple interfaces and conditionalize them by situation. Here’s an Introduction to XUL and a tutorial.
Along the same lines is IBM’s SASH platform for “weblications.” Trouble with SASH is that 1) it’s windows-only right now, and 2) it requires a “weblication manager” to be installed. In other words, it’s only for intranets.
I see them as approaching the same thing - web-enabled applications developed using traditional web lingo - but from opposite sides: SASH brings web syntax to the traditional applications-development arena, while XUL brings the web developer tools for traditional GUI development. (Oh yeah, there’s also MSIE’s HTML applications)