The Web of Applications (2)

Today Jon's Radio has a piece on Mozilla Calendar. His conclusion:

Bottom line: this solution is workable, but not great. While Calendar could improve matters somewhat, it's ultimately just awkward to push whole calendar files around.

My church has been in the need of a calendar server for a long time. I haven't found something that is easy. I was thinking of the Mozilla Calendar and WebDAV solution. It's good that Jon has tried it and found it to be insufficient. So I don't think I will touch it for a while.

On the other hand, his wishes:

I wish there were a middle ground between this model and the dedicated calendar server. Imagine a WebDAV implementation that could map collections not just to whole-file resources, but to XML elements within files. Given an XML flavor of the iCalendar format, you could achieve more finely-granular control over calendar data. But the same model would work for other applications using other XML formats. And you'd have the option of searching with XPath or XQuery, again leveraging infrastructure not bound to any application domain.

I always envisioned WebDAV working this way. Maybe someday, when filesystems and XML databases merge, it will.

The idea of The Web of Applications goes along the same line but on a different level. We don't really integrate at the data level but rather at the application level. Think of applications as small pieces of logic (services) that work on data. In the example of the calendar, a subset of the whole web should be the global calendar. Each small calendar (personal, group, etc.) has permlinks to other events in other calendars. The interfaces between the calendars are of the service nature, not just at the low data level.

Significance: It's in web's distributed, decentralized, P2P model and you can only expect huge growth out of this model unless you are a Google. If each little piece (in this case, it's the calendar; in other cases other applications) can be as easy as a blog (Web2), then the growth of The Web of Applications can be exponential, just like when people started to created HTML pages (Web1) and link to each other.

Our vision: People will create small applications of all sorts and link to each other. This is the Web of Applications.