Making the connection between Gears, GreaseMonkey, JXTA, and OpenID

A while back, I wrote-up a "Collaborative GreaseMonkey" patent disclosure. It was a defensive measure to make sure no one else patented the idea and prevented the rest of us from using it. The disclosure never made it past our patent committee, and I think that is fine, since it is at least documented as prior art in some way. The code never got to the point where it was worth sharing, but I do plan to revive it at some point.

I'm seeing that more and more people are starting to get ideas that are more and more similar to what I had in mind. Today, I read about someone dreaming up thoughts on using Google Gears to perform OpenID and OAuth. I like the thought pattern.

Gears, GreaseMonkey, OpenID, and P2PSockets (JXTA) have the potential to re-invent the web and to establish a real web operating system. Gears enables the JavaScript written into web pages to become part of a real, persistent application with persistent data storage and threads. GreaseMonkey provides a solution to edit existing web applications with user-controled, local customizations and to create applications fully local, without needing to learn how to write a web server application. OpenID gives a single solution for authenticating yourself across those web applications. P2PSockets allows the applications and data you host locally to be discovered on the web without needing to own a web server.

The result is an application building environment that is an incremental step from simple HTML+JavaScript editing and allows everyone to invent their own web, rather than just rely on the web that the social networking sites control today.

The success of this web is, of course, controlled by the economy it creates. An a-la-carte business model, like the one provided by Amazon's web services, is a great way to ensure that the bandwidth and data storage necessary for the locally-hosted services to scale.

Thoughts?

Paper Airplane and Web Operating Systems

I've got a few posts in the works, but reading Brad Neuberg's blog post this morning on HyperScope has got me itchy to mention one of my pleas to the folks creating web operating systems. It was Brad's reference to Paper Airplane that has made me lose my patience. Paper Airplane is a JXTA-based project to allow anyone to serve up web content without a web server.

Paper Airplane is a Mozilla plugin that empowers people to easily create collaborative P2P web sites, without setting up servers or spending money. It does this by integrating a web server into the browser itself, including tools to create collaborative online communities that are stored on the machine. Paper Airplane Groups are stored locally on a user's machine. A peer-to-peer network is created between all of the Paper Airplane nodes that are running in order to resolve group names and reach normally unreachable peers due to firewalls or NAT devices.

Parts of Paper Airplane have been modularized into the P2P Sockets project, a reimplementation of standard Java sockets on top of Jxta and ports of standard web servers, servlet engines, etc. to run on top of a peer-to-peer network. P2P Sockets is at a 1.0 beta level, while Paper Airplane development is just beginning. Paper Airplane code will be posted to this site as it is developed.

See the demo screencast of Paper Airplane in action to get a quick overview.

Well, the Paper Airplane demo is starting to look pretty good. The bee in my bonnet is telling me to try to reach those Web OS folks, namely YouOS and Parakey, and make sure they aren't leaving this great research on the side of their efforts.

It must be among the key objectives of a Web OS to provide a programming layer, core set of services, and guided user interface paradigms. Decentralized hosting is fundamental among that set of services as it is completely necessary for privacy, reliability, and ease-of-use. To require centralized hosting, that is, to fail to provide for all users to be service and content providers, would be an devastating sin.

Expect more on this topic from me soon.