Personal Cloud and Adobe Air.
Filed under: blogging, cloud, sphere
The New York Times recently published an article about Adobe Air and the blurring of traditional web and desktop application development:
Adobe Blurs Line Between PC and Web
and there is a nice FAQ from Adobe on the differences and advantages of the Air approach:
I feel that we have a fairly deep perspective on the differences and advantages of desktop applications vs. web applications. SupraSphere, being first and foremost and new kind of web browser, is obviously a desktop application since it doesn’t necessarily make sense to think of a web browser as an AJAX application. ;)
However, we do have a web-only AJAX version of some of the features of SupraSphere, particularly some of the search and collaboration features. Desktop applications have a few distinct disadvantages, around management of updates, stability, and often privacy, where many people have gotten burned by desktop applications infested with spyware and adware. Furthermore, web applications are quite often much easier to use since all you can really do is click. The richness of certain interfaces, whether in Flash or on the desktop, often make it harder to use the applications because people often have a hard time learning new interfaces. Browser applications are often popular because it provides a “paradigm sandbox” where you can click and go back, often can’t “right-click”, and can’t bury too many options too deep in menu structures. Most people can figure out Flash navigation on a website, but as soon as you start developing applications in Flash, people are going to start to get lost.
As far as Adobe Air, it seems that the major innovation is that Adobe Air allows an application written with web technologies (javascript particularly) that uses a RIA Flash runtime, but that can operate on local desktop data, which also implies offline access. This is definitely interesting, but we have taken a different approach to unifying the web and the pc.
Our goal is to create a “personal cloud” (see the reference to “kevincloud” in the NY Times article). Ideally, this would involve multiple servers (or virtual servers) configured as peered instances, where all data is replicated across instances hopefully across data centers. This would provide automated backup and redundancy so that a person’s entire data environment is not dependent on any given provider, and we might look into a default configuration being an encrypted disk (with only one service on one port running to provide suprasphere services), so that if a virtual machine instance was “lost”, it wouldn’t be as huge of a privacy concern.
Then, all devices (including personal computers) would provide a view of the data stored in this “cluster” of personal servers. In addition, these systems will not be single-user. They are inherently network aware and multi-user, making it possible to collaborate inside with other individuals or groups, but where the underlying architecture will be distributed.
Essentially, rather than trying to move web applications back to the PC hard drive in order just to provide richer interfaces and private data access, we are trying to provide the equivalent to the PC hard drive that “lives in the cloud”. This should provide all of the attributes that people associate with cloud computing, such as data reliability and high availability, API’s for services integration and re-purposing, and multiple views of data from different interface mashups. In fact, it should accelerate these trends by providing a starting point for web services that are private to the individual and highly personal.
Posted on February 26th, 2008 by David Thomson
1 Comment
March 9th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
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