lesscode.org

I haven’t had as much time to follow the press as I’d like but they seem to be catching on at a frantic pace. Phil Wainewright (of Loosely Coupled fame) has an article up on ZDNet entitled How AJAX kills the Application Server:

An unnoticed side-effect of implementing rich internet application platforms — whether they’re AJAX or anything else — is that this ‘client-service’ architecture eliminates the need for an application server to connect the Web client to back-end resources. Sure, if you’re a company like Zimbra implementing a new resource at the back-end, in its case an email server, then obviously that server is a new addition. But it’s still devolving more processing to the client, so it requires far less horsepower than it would to deliver the same functionality to a wholly web-based client.

The new “Application Server” is a web server, a dynamic language, and templating.

I also like how we’ve decided to call this setup “rich internet application platforms”. Personally, I think “The Web” is a better term, but you can call it “Sponge Bob Square Pants” for all I care. Let’s get on with it.

The industry is realizing that there are very few business applications that you cannot build with this basic set of components. What’s more is that all that is needed to transform the basic setup into an integration platform is to stop thinking about the web as a bunch of “pages” and start using HTTP for what it’s worth.

People everywhere are asking themselves what this mess of crap of technology they’ve accumulated is really doing for them. It’s about time.

I’ve branched off into the new thread (from Should Database Manage The Meaning? thread ) in order to start from a clean slate. The previous thread still has a number of unanswered questions lingering, and I didn’t want to introduce new ones.

What the lively debate in the ‘database and meaning’ thread revealed to me is that a number of people appear steeped in the shared data model/architecture. They’re all talking about multiple applications hitting a single database, and how that peculiar situation dictates stringent demands on what the database must be and how it must behave.

I come from a different world. In my world, the data is not sedentary, it is mobile. It travels places. As such, it is not shared, it gets to be exchanged.

Now, as you will no doubt have no problem imagining, if two or more apps are exchanging data, they don’t care where is that data coming from. Let’s say they all exchange the data using some sort of a schema (XML schema, most likely). What ends up happening is that data starts travelling back and forth (mobile data). The receiving apps have no way of ’sniffing’, or figuring out whether the data that had just arrived is coming from a fuly normalized RDBMS, or from a flat file, or from an email server, or from a legacy data store (Domino), or from some hairy brained hierarchical mainframe database, or what have you.

So, this is the reason why I’m so befuddled upon learning that so many people regard RDBMS as a holly grail. What difference does it make, once the mobile data hit the street?