With little foresight and with the desktop application mentality deeply entrenched at Microsoft, the company poured resources into its operating system, not into web-based applications or the browser platform. Microsoft seems to under-appreciate the browser, but imbraces what Tim Bray calls the sharecropper model, preferring to mimic Adobe with Silverlight. But will Microsoft prevail this time with developer lock-in? Where will companies find developers for these closed platforms, and at what price. Developers today have an abundance of open source choices and are favoring open source convenience versus whatever closed source may yet claim as an advantage. Any advantage that once existed has greatly blurred, because open source is not only convenient — but has nearly no strings attached as far as online service delivery goes. Thus will follow a continued explosion of online applications. 

Documentation System in the Sky

At their inception, the browser and HTML introduced global static publishing to the world. People saw it and acknowledged it as providing a simple, clean, unbiased platform. Tim Berners-Lee called his invention the “documentation system in the sky”. In spite of its humble beginnings, the browser is now everywhere, with Firefox three years later, enjoying eighteen percent market share. Safari is also gaining popularity at nearly five percent market share and could become the de facto browser for mobile applications. Because browser-based applications pose a threat Microsoft desktop licensing, Microsoft continues to demonstrate no roadmap, no leadership, no innovation and meager support for timely browser maintenance, much less improvements.

A few years ago no online application vendors cared to admit that Microsoft-dictated changes to Internet Explorer could ruin their business. There was a conspiracy of silence, for fear of partner repercussions from Microsoft. At that time only Google possibly perceived the potential magnitude of the problem if the browser became encumbered with Microsoft-only features. Today awareness of such general vulnerability has changed, and the industry enjoys more choices and less reliance on Microsoft. For instance, Apple has worked to support Webkit, Mozilla is working on a faster Javascript engine, and Google Gears has made substantial progress in its first year. The browser and online applications market are not only healthy, but are at the cusp of an innovation explosion. As Ben Galbraith said at the Google I/O Developer Conference in San Francisco, Wednesday, “The browser jail is being broken.”

An Embedded SQLite Database

So what’s great about Gears? As Aaron Boodman explains, having a SQLite database allows application data to persist on the client for many useful purposes including full text search. With Gears’ LocalServer, applications can run offline. WorkerPool allows processes to run in a background thread, which helps prevent user interaction from being momentarily blocked, something we have all experienced in a browser. Boodman pointed out several Gears introductions made at the conference, including desktop shortcuts, “toast” style desktop notifications, geolocation, a filepicker and blobs. 

Possibly one of the most beautiful things about Gears is the separate namespace, which means a developer never needs to use anything in Gears unless he or she chooses to.  As Boodman demonstrated, all functionality of the Gears plugin is optional. If the same features are natively implemented in a browser, they can be used by default. The idea of Gears is to extend and encourage innovation in browsers, not dictate standards. Since it’s open source, Gears’ features can be readily adopted by the browser developers too, if they wish.

Google Gears could drive the next wave of online application innovation. With both online and offline data, rapidly developed and deployed applications using Gears will shake out more innovations for both consumers and enterprises. Application vendors placing bets on Silverlight or Flex should take a hard look at Gears. Not only is Gears open and free, there is an even better reason for them to consider Gears. Their futures may depend on it.

Photo Credit: Elsie Esq

Moreover, during the past 10 years, nearly every business has saved extensively on travel and marketing costs by using video-conferencing. Yet live video traffic further stresses network hardware and bandwidth.

Web applications like email and SaaS-based ERP, CRM and other business applications don’t require a lot of bandwidth. But running voice and video traffic on a single, IP-based network with multiple real time applications is now commonplace. Unfortunately, businesses too often expand their networks piecemeal, in reaction to new application and performance issues identified by employees and customers.

More Network Challenges are Coming

In addition to the current challenges of data, voice and video, other challenging network scenarios are here or on the horizon:

• Traffic over unmanaged networks, such as a telecommuter connecting over a virtual private network (VPN) and mobile 3G networks.
• The logical next step towards cloud computing, with virtualization either on a third party cloud or an enterprise data center.
• Storage, servers, switches and routers combined into a unified, multi-purpose footprint in the data center.

To accommodate these new bandwidth intensive architectures and services, many businesses have upgraded their network hardware ad hoc, spending extensive time and labor on network administration. It’s easy to overlook the cost of labor when measuring IT productivity. According to McKinsey, labor is now the largest cost component of IT operations, eclipsing the sum of software, hardware and maintenance costs.

Many businesses alternatively choose to outsource much of their information technology. But on-premise networking equipment is still required, even with application outsourcing. System administrators can handle many network issues, but with voice and video traffic, some network engineering expertise is helpful. For instance, there are great variations in network demand throughout the business day, as call volume or conferencing traffic rise and fall.

Network Quality of Service is Key

The major problems with most networks are well established. The big difficulties with voice and video quality are latency, jitter and packet loss. Poor audio quality is more annoying to users than poor video quality, since the human ear is more sensitive to noise and delays than the human eye.

To avoid the imperfections caused by latency, jitter and packet loss, a network must be properly designed and managed. There are three basic areas of focus. Capacity management refers to the amount of bandwidth available. Most local area networks have very high capacity, so bandwidth problems are usually only associated with the wide area network (WAN) or the interfaces to the WAN.

The key to making most efficient use of the WAN is to prioritize traffic in the routers and switches. In other words, voice and video quality can be maintained by giving them a higher priority than data traffic. Such prioritization has almost no noticeable effect on the data traffic.

Network monitoring helps identify potential issues related to peak usage and server capacity, so degraded performance can often be avoided, and less investment is made on bandwidth or equipment.

Enter the Multi-Service Business Gateway

Socrates once asked, “How many things are there which I do not want?” An excellent question, not just for philosophers, but for IT Managers, CIOs and CEOs as well. In the past there may have been three, four, even five or more pieces of equipment and associated software required to operate a business network. Today, there are single-source solutions containing both the hardware and the software needed to run a converged data, voice and video network. Known as a Unified Communications Gateway (UCG) or more commonly as a Multi-Service Business Gateway (MSBG), these solutions simplify and lower the equipment and administration needed to operate a high-capacity business network.

Businesses previously interested in IP-PBX solutions, are now combining a diverse range of voice and data functionality on a single appliance. Many businesses require LAN compatibility with multiple wireless IP handsets and access to multiple types of SaaS applications. “Application performance is a big concern,” says Jeff Dixon, Chief Strategy Officer of U4EA Technologies. “The impact of a non-optimal network includes loss of productivity among employees and potential loss of business.” MSBG solutions can identify network issues before they become a problem, eliminate software incompatibility and simplify network configuration.

At the time it was indeed an infernal battle with computers; monotonous tinkering, prone to error and failure. Out of this problem, arose a solution from Berners-Lee, and a standard which revolutionized computing and communications.

The Documentation System in the Sky

Berners-Lee decided to write a paper. To Berners-Lee it was a difficult idea to explain at the time. He imagined it as “some big, virtual documentation system in the sky” he said. He gave the proposal to his boss, who called it “vague, but exciting”. Nevertheless, in a most fortuitous management decision, Berners-Lee was given the green light to work on the project. Indeed his implementation worked so well that he is considered the inventor of the world wide web. Extensions of the HTML standard today, make it possible for anyone with a computer to share information in writing, on a moments notice, with anyone, virtually anywhere in the world. It wouldn’t have happened this way without the work at CERN.

The History of the Browser

The world wide web Berners-Lee invented in 1990 didn’t catch on immediately. In January 1992 there were only 50 web servers in the world. In July of 1992, Perry Wei at UC Berkeley demonstrated the Viola browser for Unix X Windows. In November of 1992, Tony Johnson at SLAC delivered the Midas browser for X Windows. Jim Calliau at CERN started development of the Samba browser for the Macintosh. In December 1992, Perry Wei, embedded programs in HTML pages, which he demonstrated to Sun Microsystems engineers, including the Viola source code. More accomplishments have followed. Today, Internet Explorer is the chief browser and Google is the main search engine for sorting through the billions of documents on the web.

A Call for Raw Data Now

But despite the current success and sophistication of web-based sharing, Berners-Lee directs our attention to a new priority he calls “Raw Data Now.” Speaking at the TED Conference, he made his point with a simple premise, “Data, you cannot naturally use by itself.” In other words, for it to be useful, we should combine and share our data with other data. Berners-Lee calculates that without sharing, data serves a very limited purpose. Not only should we share our data, but we should demand that governments and businesses share the data they prepare as well, he says. Accessible raw data is his new objective for the world wide web. As he points out, “data drives a huge amount of what happens in our lives… because somebody takes the data and does something with it.” To Berners-Lee, it is essentially from this sharing of data, that advances in science will emerge.

Three Rules from Tim Berners-Lee

If the past was document sharing, the future is data sharing. Berners-Lee says now, “I want you to put your data on the Web.” But how should we go about that? To answer that question, he provides three points of instruction. One, a URL should point to the data. Two, anyone accessing the URL should get data back. Three, relationships in the data should point to additional URLs with data.

These three rules are much simpler departure from the past 10 years of discussion, chiefly focused on the “semantic” web and a “resource description framework”. Those concepts have so far received little mainstream acceptance because of their high level of abstraction. Other technology is faring better, in particular the hardware devices. For example, wider data collection through common 3G devices can now monitor traffic, temperature, emergencies and other events with transparent data connectivity. If the past is any indication, hardware advances will continue to arrive much earlier than software advances. So while the raw data is coming, we still have a long way to go before the software to access a world wide web of data is mature.

Combs’ cites the project’s rapid popularity as the initial milestone. Over the following months, he received emails asking about his plans for the project. He realized it needed his full-time commitment. His employer at the time had little interest in an open source network analyzer but eventually Combs found the right partner. Today CACE Technologies is the project sponsor, a change he cites as the second significant milestone — as well as CACE becoming his employer.

A third milestone was the build-up of the user and developer community. “We attracted people who stuck with Wireshark — people smarter than me”, he claims. “And we needed an infrastructure including CVS and mail lists that could leverage their talents.” Combs explained that most Wireshark contributors work for larger companies than CACE. The parallel architecture of Wireshark makes their participation easier, letting them work simultaneously on their own pieces, such as protocols.

The Asterisk Project

Mark Spencer, founder of Digium and the Asterisk project, was in San Francisco for the Open Source Business Conference in April and gave us his thoughts. As Spencer explains, Asterisk was started from a real business requirement — his own company needed a phone system. “Telephony” he recalls, “was a large market with no Microsoft-like monopoly, and back then phone systems were expensive.”

To keep a complex development project like Asterisk running smoothly, Spencer set up an issue tracker, something he still considers a significant milestone. Asterisk has many contributors to manage, he explains. He initially targeted a technical audience with Asterisk, adding further, that he designed the code base to support “extreme customization”.

Spencer likewise encouraged the developers to earn income from the Asterisk ecosystem. Digium sponsored the first Asterisk conference to provide them an opportunity to do commercial business and discuss how to move the project forward.

The Mondrian Project

The MySQL Conference in Santa Clara offered an opportunity to speak with Julian Hyde, founder of the Mondrian project. Mondrian is an OLAP cube that Hyde wrote as a skunk project with his company’s permission. Mondrian, he explains, is based on an OLAP standard he created — one which is similar to the Microsoft OLAP product.

Mondrian’s popularity took off when an industry analyst highlighted it in an article. “Open source” Hyde tells us, “provided a multiplier effect, allowing people with the same interests to converge on one project.” But the milestone was when people started to use it, he adds. Hyde explains that using SourceForge was not a watershed but it helped get visibility. Awareness attracted Andreas Voss, for example, a developer with whom Hyde agreed to provide cross-support, giving Mondrian a technical boost through JPivot’s navigational capability.

Even with Mondrian’s success, Hyde didn’t want to start a company. Instead he looked for someone to back the project. He met Richard Daley of Pentaho at a conference, and was impressed with their business model and professionalism. Hyde now has two roles there: architect of the roadmap and community advocate. “Engineers at other companies using Mondrian are full-time contributors” he explains, and “these people have a strategic interest in stable Mondrian code.” Having a commercial sponsor helped the project achieve maturity and industry strength, including regular releases, Hyde says.

Hyde is looking ahead to another milestone. He would like the open source community to help adopt OLAP4J, because, he explains, “the commercial world has failed to provide us with a standard.”