Technology Strategy

One of the great frustrations of developing any Web based software system is the request driven paradigm that the HTTP protocol demands. The user sends a request and the server responds, based on some further user interaction further requests are sent and responded to.  There are clever ways of circumventing this behaviour, but they have all been rather messy. One big problem is that a request is generated on the client side either in HTML code or in some Javascript and then handed off to a handler on the server, there maybe many such handlers for different types of request. The response is then handled on the client side somewhere. It all get`s rather messy keeping track of where the request responses are handled and maintaining state. It reminds me of the bad old days of BASIC, where the GOTO command caused execution of the program to jump around. As code grew in complexity it became very difficult to track or debug. Developers were always discouraged from using GOTO unless ab...

We are no longer in control of the devices on which our media and services are being consumed. They are becoming more varied and numerous in their differences. This is not a new problem, we have been faced with this issue for some time. Previous best solutions revolved around detecting the device capabilities at the server side and making intelligent choices to render the appropriate, fit-for-purpose content on the user device. This solution requires constant updating of the server side logic to account for all the new devices, this is a complex activity, prone to error and cannot possibly account for all the possible variations. Most recently there have been changes in the capabilities of most modern devices. (1) They have sufficient computing power to work out how to render their own content (ignoring legacy devices for now) (2) Most modern devices can run client side scripts to interpret data and render this data appropriately (3) We can define all we...

It's all about data ! Bandwidth will become more freely available at lower cost. Mobile Bandwidth will increase also with cost reduction as technology scales (4G, WiMax etc). As this is all happening the Mobile device, Tablet, Laptop, PC and TV are converging. They are currently different devices, however the operating systems (e.g Android) and the user interfaces are going to continue to converge. Cloud (or remote) storage and services will mean that devices are less dependent on physical hardware on-site and almost entirely dependent on the Internet connection and local processor (see for example Dell's USB stick PC , Rasberry Pi or BeagleBone Black ) As the operating systems converge and thus the user experiences, developers will have more incentive to develop frameworks that work across all devices. Already technologies like WebRTC are being developed to allow complete media transfer between browsers on any device. This means file sharing, video, photo's withou...