Software Evolution

Those of us who have been around for awhile constantly joke about how “I remember building that 10 years ago” everytime some big “new” trend emerges. It’s always a lesson in market readiness and timing for a given idea. The flurry around Google Chrome has rekindled the conversation around distributed apps. Most folks are tied up in the concept of a “new browser,” but Chrome is actually another crack at the age old “distrbuted/server-side application” problem; albeit an apparent good one. The real news in Chrome (I’ll avoid the V8 vs. TraceMonkey conversation for now) is native Google Gears support.

My favorite kind of technology is the kind that quietly gets built, then one day you wake up and it’s changed everything. Google Gears has that potential and if Chrome winds up with meaningful distribution (or Firefox adopts Gears) web apps as we know them will finally have mark-up-level access to local resources (read “offline functionality”). This kind of evolution is long overdue.

Another lacking component on the network is the age-old, CS101, notion of event-driven architectures. HTTP GET dominates web traffic, and poor ‘ol HTTP POST is rarely used. Publish and subscribe models are all but unused on the network today, and Gnip aims to change that. We see a world that is PUSH driven rather than PULL. The web has come a looooong way on GET, but apps are desperate for traditional flow paradigms such as local processor event loops. Our goal is to do this in a protocol agnostic manner (e.g. REST/HTTP POST, XMPP, perhaps some distributed queuing model)

Watching today’s web apps poll eachother to death is hard. With each new product that integrates serviceX, the latency of serviceX’s events propegating through the ecosystem degrades, and everyone loses. This is a broken model that if left unresolved, will drive our web apps back into the dark ages once all the web service endpoints are overburdened to the point of being uninteresting.

We’ve seen fabulous adoption of our API since launching a couple of months ago. We hope that more Data Producers and Data Consumers leverage it going forward.