Cloud Gets more Cloudy with YAP
I bet 2009 will be a fruitful Cloud year. We’ve got Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, etc and now Yahoo Application Platform, the YAP.
Here is what Yahoo says:
The Yahoo! Applications Platform (YAP) is the software and services that enable developers to build web applications that are available throughout Yahoo!
The Yahoo! Applications Platform has the following components:
- Development environment - A browser-based tool that enables software developers to quickly create, preview, and publish web applications.
- APIs and web services - Programmatic access to OpenSocial functionality and popular Yahoo! web services.
- Distribution and discovery infrastructure - The built-in features for publishing applications on galleries on web pages such as Yahoo! Profiles. End users can discover applications by searching or browsing within application galleries.
- Runtime and rendering environment - The backend servers and software that run applications and convert the code into HTML.
Sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? The last bullet really caught my eyes. It’s a runtime and rendering environment! So, it’s a cloud, or is it?
Regardless, there are differences comparing EC2 and GAE.
EC2 is a virtualization environment, period. GAE is very primitive and it’s a hybrid virtualization environment. GAE is closer to a web hosting solution than anything else (many would argue with this though.)
I think about facebook platform when I’m reading about YAP, not EC2 or GAE. YAP is trying to be a much much more open fackbaook alike platform. When you think about facebook, I bet you sill sense the boundary, or the wall around it. But YAP is just flat out, the whole web. Does it work? I’m not sure. I believe people like boundaries as much as like openness. Facebook platform makes lot of people rich but I haven’t heard anybody got rich by developing Google gadgets.
Anyway, I do keep RIA in mind when getting more into the clouds. A RIA will always be part of a bigger thing. When you are doing serious RIA, most likely you are dealing with server side stuffs as well. The server side is moving into cloud. That’s trend on the web. Does this trend has any significant impact on how we are developing RIA applications? I don’t know. But what I do know is that everything is intertwined with others on the web. You can run but you can’t hide.
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