It seems that with each day computers are exceedingly more powerful but we do less and less with them. The guidance computer used to land Apollo on the moon ran at 2.048 MHz and had 2K of memory. The slowest computer in our office runs at 2.0 GHz and has 1.0 GB of memory and we’re not doing anything nearly as impressive as putting a man on the moon. Next year’s computers will make that look seriously outdated.

We’ve recently decided to put the extra power of our computers to good use, especially when we’re off at lunch or away for a spell. Our Macs are now supporting efforts to help find a cure for muscular dystrophy, defeat cancer, fight AIDS and make an impact on genome research.

How?

We’re running a program from the people who kicked off the grid computing craze with SETI@home that powers the World Community Grid. We feel this is an important way to put our spare cycles to good use. It’s easy and has the potential to make a huge impact on the future, especially if more people join in. And we’d like you to.

Learn more at the World Community Grid website. Download the software. And if you’re willing, join team 3000k to help us put our spare cycles to good use.

Websites:
World Community Grid
Team 3000k

After going through a few template revisions of a web application we’ve been developing, I became stuck. I just couldn’t get the interface to look like it was supposed to be used the way it was intended. The issue was that the interface was a set of tabs, each containing form fields, organized by columns. The challenge was to make the interface, which was basically a spreadsheet, to feel not so spreadsheet-like.

The ‘Ah-ha!’ moment came when I realized what it was we were really trying to achieve with the interface, on a very basic level. We were organizing tabular data, so the solution really became quite obvious. Instead of ‘divs’ and ’spans’, organize the interface using ‘tables’.

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Reuters, the big international news wire service, announced yesterday that it’s opening a new news bureau. Ho hum, right? Maybe not. It’s opening that news bureau in Linden, the home of Second Life, which is an online video game (more or less).

A new bureau in a video game.

Reuters, a major international company probably not much disposed to flights of fancy or having their employees waste time on video games while at work, has assigned one reporter, full time, to cover the news and events going on in this world (it’s more of a world, really, than a video game. It’s an online simulation of real life).

This might seem a bit weird, or even irrelevant to your business, but it’s not. Second Life, you see, has ties to real-world companies and real-world dollars. In fact, according to the Second Life website nearly US$500,000 is spent in the in-game economy each day. Those are not virtual dollars, but real ones that users deposit to purchase in-game items like houses, investments, and consumer goods from real-world business.

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We all thought the web platform would come from one of the big players, most notably Google. It was going to be the Google OS that would compete with Microsoft and prevent Yahoo or eBay or Amazon from dominating the ‘net. With thousands of the smartest minds around Google has the intelligence to create the platform of the future, with their vast server farms and tremendous reach they have the technology, and with its stock flying high Google undoubtedly has the money.

I think the investment by Jeff Bezos shows that 37signals is making their own play at the web platform, however, and they’re using a fundamentally different strategy. 37signals is working to change how we think about ourselves, our place in the world, and how we work - not just provide tools or an API to tie our products to.

On their blog post announcing the Bezos investment Jason states:

“It will be great learning from Jeff as we build 37signals into one the great companies of the next 20 years.”

With the success of Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire, Writeboard, and Ta-da List we have seen the signals winning strategy for web app development. Ruby on Rails is a hot framework that is empowering the community to follow in their footsteps. And, as the quote above shows, they have the ambition.

The 37signals approach includes a final unique element that Microsoft (and, to a lesser extent, Google), have lost. The signals are winning the hearts and minds of developers. Every day thousands of people across the world are heavily influenced by the signals blog and live by the philosophy encapsulated in their book, Getting Real.

Package all of this together and it’s clear that 37signals is a pioneer in the frontier of web applications, provides a framework for cutting-edge development, and, most importantly, is changing the way we think about ourselves and how we work. They have won the hearts and minds of many smart, eager, focused shops across the world that are at the forefront of “Web 2.0” development.

It’s not an OS strategy like Microsoft used in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but I think that 37signals has a greater chance at impacting how a web platform develops than than Google, Yahoo, eBay, or even Jeff’s little company, Amazon. Their challenge is to keep hold of those hearts and minds. Staying small is an important step toward maintaining that place, but presents its own difficulties (especially keeping good people, maintaining influence, and not becoming smothered in an increasingly populated arena).

Let’s see how this all plays out.

Unless you have been locked up in a cave somewhere for the past few years, you no doubt have heard of the term “Web 2.0” used to describe a new level of maturation and sophistication seen in the latest crop of web applications. A “Web 2.0” application is responsive and streamlined. Special attention is paid to improving usability and creating an active and an intuitive interface, brining the overall user experience closer to a quick-responding standalone application than to the clunky, latency-ridden web application of yesterday.

At the heart of “Web 2.0” lies AJAX, the technology used to have a browser asynchronously communicate with the web server. “The idea is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This increases the web page’s interactivity, speed, and usability”. (Wikipedia)

As with any emerging web technology AJAX is going through a very rapid transformation. It started a couple of years back with developers hacking together code using iframes and the XMLHttpRequest object to make their web pages more interactive. These were the alpha days of AJAX. No one really paid attention to the alpha and the potential of this technology until Google took it to the functional beta level by creating Google Maps followed by Google Suggest and Google Groups. While this made AJAX a household name among web developers, even at this point developers were using homegrown code in their applications to make AJAX calls.

AJAX 1.0 started to emerge with the wide availability of open source AJAX libraries helping developers to concentrate more on the functionality of their applications and less on random browser incompatibilities and idiosyncrasies that went along with AJAX development. Prototype and script.aculo.us are probably the best-known libraries among the hundreds that are now available (Links at the end of the post). Any developer could quickly deploy a functional AJAX application using these libraries.

Reminiscent of how languages like Basic and C++ transformed into Visual Basic and Visual C++ respectively and how handwritten HTML gave way to WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver and FrontPage, AJAX once again made a move to become more of a server side component than a client side one. This latest development, which I refer to as AJAX 2.0, is the current state of affairs. Almost every major player in the market is working on making AJAX an inherent part of their respective development platform. This means that the developers no longer have to first work on the server-side code (ASP, PHP, Java, etc) and then separately integrate the JavaScript AJAX libraries in the front-end to get the desired functionality. Instead the server-side code written by the developers will automatically generate the appropriate front-end code to create the desired AJAX calls and user interface effects. This makes the development environment a lot more cohesive and allows the developer to create almost the entire application using a platform he/she is familiar with. As long as the developer knows the correct API for a given platform he/she can create a great looking, functional, responsive, and cross-browser user interface without ever touching a line of JavaScript. The recently released “Google Web Toolkit” allows Java developers to code AJAX calls in JAVA. The well-known Ruby on Rails platform comes with the Prototype and script.aculo.us libraries integrated to allow developers to do AJAX programming using Ruby code. There are several AJAX wrappers and frameworks available for .NET and PHP developers. I feel the next step will be the full integration of AJAX-backed user interface components with various IDEs like Visual Studio, Zend Studio, Eclipse, etc. giving us a true one-stop shop to create a complete “Web 2.0” application.

Related Links

List of AJAX/JS libraries:
http://www.maxkiesler.com/index.php/weblog/comments/round_up_of_50_ajax_toolkits_and_frameworks/

Google web toolkit: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
Yahoo User interface Lib: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
Ruby on Rails: http://www.rubyonrails.org/
Prototype: http://prototype.conio.net/
Script.aculo.us: http://script.aculo.us/

Good general sites on AJAX:
http://particletree.com/
http://ajaxian.com
http://www.ajaxmatters.com/r/welcome