There is an interesting article I picked up today in Fast Company that quickly and succinctly cuts to the point of what these critical moves forward on the Web mean for the future. Counter intuitive to the folks very wrapped up in the “There’s an App for That” mindset comes this article Killer Apps: Why App Stores Are Not the Business Model for the 21st Century which brings to the forefront the fallacies that every company creating, and more over controlling, an App Store concept for their business will lead to a nirvana of beautiful, useful devices and software for our collective future.

All quotes from the article.

In the age of the Web, developers can get their programs to end users without anyone intervening, so locked-down software sales will always be going against the grain.

…the App Store’s true rival isn’t a competing app marketplace. Rather, it’s the open, developer-friendly Web. When Apple rejected Google Latitude, the search company’s nearby-friend-mapping program, developers created a nearly identical version that works perfectly on the iPhone’s Web browser. Google looks to be doing something similar with Voice, another app that Apple barred from its store.

Too many times in the Apple App Store’s short life has controversy over gatekeeping cropped up, this generally isn’t when Johnny Developer wants to deploy his 1,000th copy of a flashlight app to the App Store but when truly disruptive, innovative ideas are hatched, for instance Google Voice, that disintermediate Apple or its carrier partners from something they currently completely control.

Continuing to increase what is possible on the web, like HTML5 and it’s related technologies are doing, ensure Apple or any other device or connectivity company will not define how technology effects our lives. Google Voice is a huge boon to how I use my phone and how people contact me from the transcription of messages to the transparent ringing of multiples lines… My Android phone let’s me choose this time and sanity saving work flow for myself, Apple says my phone will work the way they want it to and AT&T says the data they choose will flow over their pipes.

Apple’s app bonanza won’t end anytime soon…

Yes… I’m not crazy, things generally don’t just appear, get wildly popular and then disappear completely. The Apple App Store will serve iPhone users as long as the iPhone exists…

…but you’d be a fool to ignore the long-term trend in software — away from incompatible platforms and restrictive programming regimes, and toward write-once, run-anywhere code that works on a variety of devices, without interference from middlemen. As different kinds of mobile devices hit the market, from phones to tablet PCs to smartpens to e-book readers and beyond, developers will find that trend harder to ignore. They’ll need to create programs that can work not just on iPhones but on everything…

Fortunately, there’s an app for that: It’s called the Web.

‘Nuff said.

Posted from AppliedHTML5

Web Sockets are set to revolutionize the way the “real time web” works, today most websites use AJAX as a way to fake a real time dynamic experience… think a stream of Twitter tweets popping up relating to a current event. AJAX approaches that try to get to the “real time” end are similar to a kid riding in the back seat on a long driving vaction with their parents “Are we there yet?… Are we there now?… How about now?” constantly pinging their data sources asking if something changed. Web Sockets aim to change all that and simplify it for web users and developers across all web browsers and devices that contain them think Mobile devices, televisions, nearly anything with a screen in the future… you have to love open standards!

The Web Sockets API creates real time two way communications between a server and the end user allowing streaming of information back and forth just like a desktop application in real time without the waste of the current AJAX approach either checking too often when nothing has changed or potentially missing a new message between its checks the Web Socket will only transfer data when needed.

Well… Are we there yet?

We are not quite there yet, Web Sockets will require support on the server side and the client side but in my view both are progressing nicely. Here is a run down of the early Web Socket server side tool kits I could find.

Python

• http://code.google.com/p/pywebsocket/

Ruby

• http://www.igvita.com/2009/12/22/ruby-websockets-tcp-for-the-browser/

PHP

• http://code.google.com/p/phpwebsocket/

JavaScript

• http://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js (Powered by Flash, possibly used as a fallback)

Erlang

• http://armstrongonsoftware.blogspot.com/2009/12/comet-is-dead-long-live-websockets.html

Browser Support

Web Sockets are currently supported in the developer releases of Google Chrome and will soon be available in Mozilla FireFox.

I think I’ve heard of this before… Is this new?

There are many players in this space trying to make real time information to the browser possible some names you may have heard are Comet, Ajax Push, and Ajax long polling (as I discussed earlier). I found a great post for the more technical among us that helps you decipher the differences in these protocols for further reading on the topic.

HTML 5 Web Sockets vs. Comet and Ajax

Posted from AppliedHTML5