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

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.”