Going beyond the horseless carriage phase of Web 2.0 applications
Paul Miller makes this excellent point in a blog titled “Getting enveloped by the potential of cloud computing“:
“By taking a fundamentally Web-based approach to the development of applications, we shift from bolting Web capabilities onto the silo toward a mode in which data and functionality are native to the Web: a mode in which the design decisions are more about modelling business requirements for limiting the ways in which data flows from one point to another rather than trying to anticipate the places in which it might be needed in order to design those pathways into software from the outset.Data needn’t reside within a single application, and as the trend toward ‘widgets‘ and ‘dashboards‘ has begun to illustrate, interaction with the application itself is no longer restricted to navigation within its own user interface.
How do we change the mindset of today’s application developers, in order that they stop building ‘old’ applications in the new world?”
Cloud computing is a lot more than running your applications on some utility servers on the Web. Advances like Amazon SimpleDB and open standards for gadgets like OpenSocial will dramatically change the way in which applications are designed and built.
