I've just finished a really good article in Dr. Dobb's Journal entitled, "The Return of the Desktop". The basic premise of the article is that for several years applications have become more and more web-centric and now it's time to break free of the browser and return to the desktop. I couldn't agree more.
Several months ago I was browsing Adobe's lab site, labs.adobe.com, when I came across a really neat technology called Apollo (It's since been renamed AIR - Adobe Integrated Runtime). I played with some of the demo applications and they were simply breathtaking! However, what really caught my eye was what eBay was doing with it. They had written an Apollo application that you could place on your desktop and run outside the browser, making it appear as a normal desktop application. Just Cool.
I'm really digging the new technologies popping up in this area. Things are just getting started so it will be interesting to see where we end up with all these new models popping up. I for one will continue to read, investigate, and try to keep up with all the new technology and terminology - bringing my personal views of it to you here on my blog. I'm especially interested in where data access is going in this area. The bottom line is that whatever you do eventually deals with data, which is one of the reasons I work at the company that's the leader of data access.
It's going to be a fun ride....
Jesse Davis
As Senior Director of Research & Development, Jesse is responsible for the daily operations, product development initiatives and forward looking research for Progress DataDirect. Jesse has spent nearly 20 years creating enterprise data products and has served as an expert on several industry standards including JDBC, J2EE, DRDA and OData. Jesse holds a bachelor of science degree in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State university.