When everything lives on the internet (Again)

About once a month, maybe more, an article seems to appear talking about AJAX. For those not in the know, AJAX is a technique whereby, instead of entering information on a web form and submitting and going to another page, you can do all the submitting in a little bubble, and stay right where you are. Simple in concept, AJAX represents a giant leap in usability for regular folk. For a taste, head on over to Google Maps or Netflix, among others. At google maps, enter and address like New York, NY, and marvel as that map is brought up. Then drag the map around. Not bad, eh?

No one disputes that all of this is cool beans. The matter of debate centers around web apps vs. regular apps, the titanic struggle. Will web apps supplant desktops apps? Some say yes, others say no, never. Slashdot grouches in particular seem to view web apps as silly toys that'll never conquer the world, because you can't write photoshop on the web. As a web developer, my biases are pointless to deny. Clearly, web apps aren't taking over just yet, although I'd rather use Gmail than regular mail at this point. My line usually falls on the side of "web apps aren't there... yet."

Although it's dangerous to invoke fate, especially in technology, it seems inevitable to me that network based applications will win, if not today, then tomorrow. Whether those applications will be web apps or not is a small question, as by the time the victory is complete, there will likely be no real difference between the "web" and "applications".

These days, the thought of booting entirely from a network is a silly thought. But it's really a matter of infrastructure. When the internet is always on and fast, and all but unbreakable, storing applications on a local machine will seem a silly waste. The beauty of web apps is that they need not be installed. Web apps just are.

Eventually, the whole machine will run in this manner. The network will be the computer. In our own time, we've begun moving in this direction with data. Wouldn't life be easier if every document you owned existed in one place on a network, invisibly backed up by a service provider, there for the using, as you see fit? Email already works this way. Web apps already work this way. Apple's .Mac service syncronizes my calendar, my contacts, my book marks, my mail and mail settings, and any documents I ask it to sync, all seemlessly, invisibly. There is no way to do without such convenience once you've experienced it. You develop this craving to take leave of that annoying hard drive. Some day, you will.

Of course, the curmudgeon geeks in the audience are grumbling at this point. "That's a mainframe." Nevermind what a mainframe is, the curmudgeons are right: We're going round in circles. Once upon a time, everything lived centrally, accessed through a dummy terminal, and our current dominant model of the personal machine with all our apps and data local was queer, even weird. Now the circle has come round, this time with an enormous, global infrastructure and expanding wireless ends. This time, the we have a mainframe in the air. But the idea is the same.

At long last, we're coming home.