The Desktop Reinvention - Part I

Computer desktops are so common place that we take them for granted. However in the next few years of technological innovations, Desktop will probably get reinvented a few times before getting a complete overhaul. Infact, right now the first generation of this invention is happening as we speak, with the advent of AJAX and related technologies.

What does AJAX have to do with desktop reinvention ? I will try to explain shortly, but first we need to understand what this Ajax beast is, anyway.

Ajax stands for Asynchronous JAvascript XMLHttpRequest. That sounds like a lot of gibberish. But be patient, I will be explaining each of the terms in my future entries. But for now, I just want to talk about what it means to the desktop paradigm. If you want to hear about Ajax from the horse's mouth you can go here

To begin with lets look at the acronym itself. I love this acronym: AJAX. It is catchy, and it creates an impression of something mysterious. But thats not the reason for liking this acronym. Contrary to the practice by the usual suspects (think M$) who churn out acronyms faster than their products, where they tend to take an infinitesimal piece of technology and create grand sounding, all encompassing acronyms Ajax is unpretentious and is exactly what it says: It comprises of exactly one function, namely XMLHttpRequest, allowing Javascript (most common language understood by your web browser) to be asynchronous,that is not having to wait, tapping your fingers, waiting for the data to get loaded while you surf the web.

Okay, that sounds fantastic, but is that all ? Actually no, there is a lot more to it. By adding this missing piece to the web browser, you start seeing a fundamental shift from the older client-server model used by most web services. Long ago (late 90s) when dot coms were mushrooming under every corner and every VC used to talk about B2B solutions and web services, people started building very complex web applications based on the client server model, which contained a database server, a web server and the good old web browser to access all this. In those days the browsers were stupid, browser developers stubborn and evil who wanted to tie in the user their proprietary standards, and pretty much everything other than simple HTML looked and behavedvery differently in different browsers.

Things started to change. People started to realize that it was not the web browser itself that enabled them to conquer the world but rather what you displayed in that browser. Soon things got standardized , and XML became the craze of the month, and javascript became the least common subset for displaying funky stuff. Still it was hard to do anything than the fancy scrolling tickers with javascript (and of course, those annoying animated menus) because if you pushed the javascript too hard, your browser would start hanging and you would get hour-glassed (or the lucky Mac users got beach balled).

At around this time, smart folks at google implemented Google Suggest and gmail which turned out to be quite amazing applications. I personally know a lot of smart engineers who shifted to gmail not because of the 1 GB disk space, or the much touted targeted ads (or rather inspite of the much taunted targeted ads) but because of the feeling of absolute joy when using the interface. They were online services, but their interactive UI could rival any desktop application written for Windows or Macs. Unknowingly (or for all you know, very much knowingly) these smart engineers had finally found a way to make online apps far more interesting and interactive than anything so far. The approach they used to do this was to keep the data in XML format on their server and let the browser load this data in background (i.e. asynchronously). Once the data (or part of it) is loaded, user can navigate around without having to wait for pages to load from the server. And so was invented a technique, (quite intuitive but novel nevertheless because others failed to do it the smart way) which has commonly referred to as Ajax. The actual name was something a bit longer, but was cut short right way.

At this point the more curious audience is encouraged to visit this here to learn more about
Ajax.

Finally the days of World Wide Wait was coming to an end and web could actually be a rival platform like Windows or Mac for serious applications. Hmm, now you can see where I am going with the desktop reinvention. Yes, internet is becoming the new feature rich platform and the humble web browser is becoming the new desktop.