tamant

tamant's Profile

  • Name: Tom Mant
  • Email: (Private)
  • Member Since: Jan 9, 2008
  • Last Logged In: Jul 9, 2008 9:26 AM
  • Occupation: IT Technology Evangelist
  • Expertise: Software as a Service, IT architecture, Grid, Virtualization, Data Warehousing

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Wouldn't it be great if we could buy an application and not have to worry about whether it was designed to run on Windows XP, Windows Vista, MAC OS X or some flavor of linux?

How about when you buy a personal computer you don't have to make a decison on whether it should come with Windows XP, Windows Vista, MAC OS X (don't you wish that was a choice today) or some flavor of linux - or nothing and you figure it out later?

What if every computer you bought came with a smal, highly efficient operating system that basically only acted similar to a virtual machine hypervisor, managing the allocation of resources to virtual machines (or applications). And by the way it was built into the "platform" supplied by the chip vendor and OEM's only aggregated components and added value where it counts - tools to better manage the virtual enviornments, as a peer process not as a "host" operating system.

This is the world that I would like to see evolve over the next couple of years (okay maybe 5).

Applications are compiled with the operating system extensions (purchased from today or tomorrow's operating system vendors) and sold as one package that runs on top of the thin/efficient operating system mentioned above. This way we as the consumers can worry about selecting applications and functionality and get out of the business of worrying about which operating system to buy - or worrying about which operating sytem the application will run on. We just buy the application!!! What a concept!!!

A nice extension to this would be to allow the ability to still have a more traditional "container" of applications for secure, managed interaction between applications and for providing a policy managed environment. But the applications should still be the same apps I buy to run independently - So how about an install option - standalone or in a "container" or ???

Now that would be cool.

3 Comments Permalink Tags: client_architecture, software_development, virtualization, alternate_compute_models
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Some general thoughts and ramblings on application streaming - where it is better than web applications and where it might not be.

Application streaming is an interesting technology - you can create a client rich application with sophisticated graphics and processing and yet have a high degree of security and the benefits of server side manageability. In my mind this is the best of two worlds. On the one hand you can leverage the full strength of the latest processors and graphics cabilities and on the other you can manage security and upgrades quickly and efficiently.

The application doesn't go through an install process on the client so you eliminate some of the problems associated with different people installing the same application differently. The installation can be "isolated" to protect against conflicts (in some cases this provides backwards compatibility) which also raises some challanges, although this also provides some "challenges" for the integration of mulitple applications on the same device.

Upgrades are simple and guaranteed - since you only upgrade the server and anyone using that application gets the update at next use, true for security patches as well. For those that are using the applications offline (which you can do, try that with a web app) they will get the update the next time they connect to the network.

Streaming (some products anyway) provides a means for license management, so perhaps you don't need to own as many licenses as you thought by tracking concurrent usage and preventing over subscribing. This is can be important for some expensive purchased applications.

Streaming applications are also not subject to the multitude of exploits that are written to attach web browsers and web applications. I believe that for corporate applications they are safer and easier to protect. That alone may be reason enough to justify moving in this direction.

One area where web based applications COULD be better is if they are written to work on multiple platforms with multiple browsers (such as Windows and OS X). However in practice this seems to be seldom done, most apps are still written for one environment or the other and it's more of chance that the application works in the other environments. This could be a big plus if developers would truly develop for the heterogenous world we live in.

Another is that with client rich applications there is often more database traffic being routed over the network between the client and the server infrastructure whereas in a web application the database traffic can be kept between the application server and the database server. This puts the onus on the application developer to take this into account when architecting their application. It can be done efficiently but it does raise that "old" argument and problem.

So perhaps it is time to look at how we develop applications and rather than swinging the pendelum back to all client rich applications, maybe we should be looking at a better balance of applications leveraging the best technology for the requirements.

Just a thought

4 Comments Permalink Tags: software_development, streaming, client, client_architecture, client, _management
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I've been working with application streaming for the past year or so and often when I go to other groups within Intel to try and convince them that streaming is the way to go - they ask me - why bother? They reason that they are moving more and more to web based applications so why would they implement streaming for the applications they might have left written in a client side language.

Well - that's a good question - but it's interesting that when I speak to the management team this is their response but when I talk to developers - they are very excited (usually) about this possiblity.

Why? Because most developers would rather develop in a language that is more robust than you typically get with a web application tool. They like the ability to have more control over the graphical experience for the user and the ability to do more powerful things within the language. The management team is looking at where current momentum is going and they don't want to change the direction. But should they?

Is there a compelling reason to move to more client based applications and away from web applications?

Should we have both in our toolkit? - If so - where should we use which one - why would we ever build more client based (not sure what to call this, where the execution of logic happens on the client) applications?

To evaluate this question I think it would be good to go back to why we started to move to web based applications in the first place - for those that have been around long enough to remember when all we had was client based execution of applications (after mainframes of course). Unfortunately I have been around for all of the above and have been working with applications the entire time (since 1976).

So I find this interesting - anyone else?

In my next entry - I will start to explore this question to see if we can build a case for moving to at least a more balanced view of where we put logic execution.

2 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: application_streaming, software_development
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