Last week, Dion wrote about the spectrum of AJAX tookits. He ended with a question, wondering which end of the spectrum will dominate? Will it be lightweight composable toolkits like prototype, script.aculo.us or Dojo? Or a more comprehensive toolkit like Atlas?

This came up in a chat I had w/ Jimmy Nilsson today. Well, not specifically about AJAX toolkits. Rather, we were talking about what he called technicalities vs. semantics:

I have noticed that there seems to be a focus first on the technicalities and then on the semantics. Take Indigo (or WCF) for example. There has been sooo much talk about its technical aspects, but very little talk about how to design for it. I’m pretty sure that when the technicalities have been sorted, it’s time for the semantic side. I’m not thinking about technical semantics, but rather business semantics.

On more than one occasion, I’ve had a head-beating-wall conversations with WCF folks who are completely obsessed with the secure, reliable and transactional delivery of messages, but have given exactly zero thought to the actual contents of said message. So I know where Jimmy is coming from.

With respect to AJAX toolkits, the question becomes just how easy will these lightweight toolkits compose? Because while Dion describes Google Maps as “a simple JavaScript include”, that’s just the technicalities, it doesn’t begin to deal with the semantics. For example, Dojo has Dictionary object, prototype has a Hash object. Dojo extends the Javascript Array, so does prototype. Both libraries wrap the XmlHttpRequest object. In each of these cases, it appears to me that the library authors have focused on the technicalities, but not thought about the semantics. These implementations are all semantically similar, but incompatible. So I don’t buy that these lightweight toolkits will compose well. What do I do if I’m using prototype but want the rich text editor in Dojo?

The network effect that Dion doesn’t consider is the component ecosystem phenomenon that Microsoft has a ton of experience with. Old school VB, COM/ActiveX and .NET have all had large ecosystems of components and controls evolve that extend the functionality of the baseline development platform. There’s no reason to believe that won’t happen with Atlas. I think it’s wrong to describe Atlas as a monolith or self-contained or enclosing. It’s an extensible baseline platform – i.e. the baseline functionality is set down once at the development platform and the ecosystem can extend it from there. Sure, overlapping extensions happen (how many rich text editor components are there for ASP.NET?) but at least they all have basic compatibility.

Update: Fixed link to Dojo Toolkit in the first paragraph.

Terra Nova is not the usual place I go to get news around programming language improvements. But they linked to a great presentation from POPL 2006 by Tim Sweeney of Epic Games. Tim’s talk is called The Next Mainstream Programming Language: A Game Developer’s Perspective and it talks at great length the major issues facing game developers today. As Nate Combs at Terra Nova remarked, most of these issues are not specific to the game industry, but will likely be seen there first.

Most interesting (to me) was the issue of concurrency. Tim uses Gears of War for all his examples. Of course, Gears of War is an Xbox 360 exclusive. Xbox 360, as many of you probably know, has three hyper-threaded CPUs for a total capactiy of six hardware threads. Herb Sutter talked about this in his DDJ article The Free Lunch Is Over. Tim points out – rightly so – that “C++ is ill-equipped for concurrency”. C#, Java and VB aren’t much better. Tim conculdes that we’ll need a combination of effects-free non-imperative code (which can safely be executed in parallel) and software transactional memory (to manage parallel modifications to system state).

Tim also touches on topics of performance, modularity and reliability. And he has an eye on the practical at all times. For example, he points out that even a four times performance overhead of software transactional memory is acceptable, if it allows the code to scale to many threads.

Anyway, it’s a great read so check it out. Also, MS Research has a software transactional memory project you can download if you’re so inclined.

In his now-famous talk, Dick Hardt describes Identity 2.0 as inevitable. As in “coming for sure, but not here yet”. I wonder how much of Web 2.0 is here now, and how much is inevitable? And furthermore, how much can we generalize about the future of Web 2.0 from what is happening now? As in many things, I think the answer isn’t black and white.

For example, I think we can generalize about the bright future of peer-to-peer based technologies from looking at systems like Skype and FolderShare. Naturally, with the power shifting to the edge, I believe it’s inevitable for more edge machines to communicate directly with each other rather than being mediated by a service in the center. In fact, in many cases I believe were going to want to shift a significant percentage of social computing to the peer-to-peer model. It scales better and doesn’t have centralized privacy concerns. Furthermore, I think there may be be specific peer-to-peer capabilities that are difficult or impossible to replicate with a centralized model, though so far, I haven’t them yet.

However, I’m not sure we can generalize about the future of mashups the same way. This isn’t to say I think mashups are going away – far from it. I just think that mashups a year from now will look very different than they do today.

First off, I don’t think we can  generalize the success of Google Maps. In the Programmable Web how to guide, they mention that “Plotting markers on maps is probably the easiest place to start”. Apparently, many people are taking that advice because 297 of the 411 mashups listed use one of the three major (i.e. GYM) mapping services. However, maps are unique because of the massive amount of data, the extremely simple API and the ubiquity of location information. They are also one of the few mashup API’s that runs in the browser – the vast majority of mashup API’s are back end data type services like Amazon’s E-Commerce Service. How many more in-browser mashup API’s are out there waiting to be built? I’m not sure, but as I wrote in Browser as VM, the problem with these in-browser mashup API’s is that you can’t protect your IP.

As for back-end service mashup APIs, there needs to be a way for these service providers to make money. Even if the software they use to build the service is free, things like hardware and bandwidth are not. For an Amazon or Ebay, making money on thier services is relatively easy since they are facilitating sales transactions. In the end, they probably won’t care much if a sales transaction originated on their site or on a site leveraging their APIs. However, if the service provider is ad-funded, the service API effectively routes around the site’s revenue mechanism. Take, for example, a site for tracking events like Zvents, Eventful or Upcoming. They need to drive users to the actual site in order to drive revenue. So it remains to be seen exactly how the API based access is going to work out. Today, these API’s are specifically provided for “non-commercial use only” so one way would be to charge for access via the API (either flat-rate subscription, a per-use charge or a combination of the two). Alternatively, they could be bought up by a larger company who could then afford to run the business at a loss. Yahoo already bought Upcoming and Google Base already has an event item type, but the other big companies in this space (I’d guess Microsoft, Amazon, Ebay and maybe Apple) might be interested. Again, I’m not sure how this evolves either, but it’s got to evolve beyond “non-commercial access”.

I was so excited to see the Dennis Miller’s latest HBO special, but it was such let down. He spent the first half sucking wind and the second half sucking up to the Republicans. I mean, he used to have such a sharp policital wit, but now he’s just another partisan hack. It’s pretty sad.

At least Bill Maher is back next week.

It’s been a while coming, but the print subscriptions of The Architecture Journal are underway. I got my copy of Journal 6 in the mail today. It’s not online yet, but you can get the back issues and sign up for your own free print subscription on the website.