Mike Coyle’s Weblog

Don Dodge has an interesting analysis of Ray Ozzie’s recent Tech•Ed speech.

I think that there will be four key drivers of this movement back to the client/server world, none of which involve dusting off your old PowerBuilder books (not that there’s anything wrong with that):

1. Tools like the iTunes Music Store and (our very own) ProjectPipe.com will leverage and blend web technologies and existing desktop infrastructure, so that the underlying, infrastructure-spanning solution “just works”.
2. A platform for desktop-level, consumer-friendly “mashup”-type applications, that glue together RSS feeds, web services, and local data in interesting and useful ways. This will probably be some sort of Firefox extension.
3. Microsoft Live, and the ecosystem that springs up around it.
4. The movement toward desktop web applications. I think that two factors will drive this:
• The continued growth of rapid web dev frameworks, such as TurboGears and Ruby on Rails, which increases the supply-side (i.e. developers, ISVs) opportunity cost of not using one of these frameworks when building an application.
• The maturity and growing popularity of embedded databases such as Sqlite, which considerably simplifies the deployment footprint for such applications.

Don states that “The seamless, blended, client-server-services approach makes intuitive sense.” I couldn’t agree more. This was one of the core problems that we set out to solve in ProjectPipe, since so much project activity occurs on the desktop, yet so much collaboration occurs over the Internet.

We’ve referred to this blend of “Thin Client” (web) and “Thick Client” (client/server) as our Right Client Architecture, where we let the user pick the right tool for the job, and we figure out how to do the integration. For a real-world example, read about how ProjectPipe integrates with MS Project and Excel.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 19th, 2006 at 10:01 am and is filed under software, ProjectPipe.com, architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.