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Player are examples. Individuals will no longer be shackled to the traditional
browser model of the past.
New tools are emerging that are going to trigger yet another wave of Internet
applications based on the new “browser free” model. Next generation scripting
tools will keep the simplicity of the first generation -- building applications with an
easy to use interface but with the power to access the whole range of native
desktop capabilities plus all that the Internet has to offer. Using JavaScript, the
web developers will create useful applications while the “high priests” will build a
scalable, manageable, available, reliable, and secure infrastructure to support
the applications at the server. The browser will not disappear -- features in
browsers will get better and better for viewing content and surfing the web -- but
we may see it return to what it was originally intended for - browsing.
An innovative approach for building these “browser free” applications, called
Sash (http://sash.alphaworks.ibm.com), was developed at an IBM skunk works in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sash enables web developers to use JavaScript to
create windows desktop applications that can do all the things web applications
can do but which can also take advantage of the start bar, the file explorer
metaphor, and other basic windows capabilities. The Sash “weblications” look
and feel just like native windows applications while at the same time having the
Internet connectivity capabilities of the browser. Weblications can operate online
or offline. They “live” on the desktop just like a traditional application but when
connected they get live data and interact with the web. When disconnected the
weblications can use the data locally. It is a new paradigm for web applications.
In the summer of 2000 a group of summer interns at IBM in Cambridge,
Massachusetts developed a Linux version of Sash called SashXB. It was made
available to the Linux open source community in August 2000.
The next generation of e-business
Easy is about to take on a new dimension as the web continues to evolve. In the
early stages the web allowed for browsing of documents with hyperlinks to other
documents. Then with the advent of XML it gained context so that documents
could be more easily found and, more importantly, integrated with information
technology systems. A new set of standards gained prominence in early 2001
that will allow the web to move to yet a higher level – from a web of documents to
a web of documents and applications. The “application web” is now in its infancy
but it will expand dramatically and provide a new way for application software to
be developed, published, searched, and utilized. Relatively inexperienced
software developers will be able to assemble new e-business applications as
easily as they do spreadsheets today. They will be able to locate modules of
software that were written by others and placed in a global directory organized
according to the specific capability of the software. They will then be able to link
multiple software modules together to perform the desired tasks. The user will
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