YNZi

The recent processing shift in software world has given me a paradigmn shift in thinking about software architectures.

However complicated the movie ‘Matrix Reloaded’ may seem, it made one thing clear, and that was that the Matrix was being upgraded. The same can been seen today happening with the Internet. And this processing shift I believe is at the center of it.

I remember the old days when we developed desktop applications in VB, Delphi, C++ and such languages. These applications were deployed on individual desktop computers and many of them communicated with very powerful servers. The whole idea being to make that dummy client (desktop) become more intelligent. The idea of the application residing on the computer was prevalent and acceptable. Web browsers were simply windows into the servers sitting behind them. Web servers were powerful machines that did huge amout of processing the desktop’s could not perform. So they would provide a simple output that the dummy clients (desktops) could display to the users.

Today when the desktops are more powerful than those powerful servers in old days, this overall architecture has evolved. Applications no longer need to be hosted on the desktop. They can be served in real time. The servers need not be powerful, they can be dummy. The desktops are no longer dummy, they are powerful and can be intelligent. Thus the processing has been shifting from the server to the clients. AJAX has been one of the powerful factors in implementing this beautiful architecture. Javascript has evolved as the de-facto language in making this shift possible.

Working on these concepts has been very interesting. The scope of growth this kind of architecture provides is unlimited. It finally brings the plug-n-play model to software. Just as hardware plug-n-play models have evolved over the centuries, the same is happening today with software but at a much faster rate.

I am looking forward to the days when software merge with hardware, opening horizons to a world even difficult to imagine today.