I’m looking forward to the web 2.bomb era to be over. Every man and his dog is building yet another social networking, api enabled, ajaxified, beta tag wearing application and waiting for the VC money to flow in. Just follow techcrunch.com and yawn every morning at the yasu* of the day.

Outside of the VC crazed crowd some interesting things are happening. Adobe’s announcement on HD content deployed using the Flash Player is very interesting indeed, not so much from the feature set, but what it’s actually doing technically. We now have a cross platform web delivered piece of code that is utilizing the GPU. I think this has been lost on a few people. I’m personally not interested in the HD aspect, what I am interested in is the hardware acceleration. If an appropriate DirectX or OpenGL piece of hardware is present it then the flash player will utilise it to enable full screen ‘HD’ video. Very very impressive. Tinic is a genius.

This marks (in my mind) a turning point for web apps - the crack in the dam has started, finally we are starting to really break out of the limitations of the browser, and will pave the way for some serious development of serious web applications. Perhaps Flash will have the last laugh..

I am not a fan boy of any tech religion. I do not think Adobe are God, Microsoft know it all, or Rails will fulfill my every desire. However in unison it seems, people are looking for the (r)evolution - the race is currently on to see who can deliver this technology we’re crying out for.

Taking the real (engineering) enterprise to the web

Back for one of the companies I worked for, we had a huge Delphi application that is a fat client, fat server model. A CAD/CAM app, it required lots of CPU cycles to render an entire window (real .. not the microsoft kind) structure, apply business rules etc, compared to your atypical order processing system (which are just fancy crud operations). Currently on the web, all you see are these crud applications. The so called web 2.0 era, for all of the applications we see, are really just crud systems. So nothing is there to support anything other than crud. Which rules out doing this particular app. The browser in it’s next version is only just starting to see a Canvas object whereas this has been the backbone of many desktop applications for years/decades! Flash/Flex/Air notwithstanding of course…

What gets me excited, is when the potential for an application like the previously mentioned CAD/CAM system to be delivered over the web, utilising the advantages of the web AND the advantages of the desktop. The only way of doing that is breaking out of the web browser sandbox to use a desktop’s horsepower. I think this hardware acceleration development might just kick off a chain reaction. Imagine via Actionscript, suddenly being able to harness the GPU’s drawing system…. or even processing for horribly complex calculations that suit for parallelism - instead of bringing your system to a crawl, pipe them off to your GPU.

Think of the possibilities….

An interior design application, rendered in beautiful photo realism with all the lighting effects you could imagine, allowing you to design your dream interior and order everything for it online.

Games, delivered online, using local client connections for rendering - all code, etc retained on the server and piped down on demand. Infinitely expansive as the code is never kept locally. Log back in the next day and all new baddies added into the game without you even knowing until you stumble upon one.

User powered grid computing services. Imagine firing up your beast of a computer, connecting to medical research system, and donating your GPU cycles - without having to download any nasty java or activex applets to your desktop. Companies are salivating over the PS3’s power for this and scrambling to figure out how to do it, imagine taking this to the desktop arena ?

Is this not the Holy Grail we want ?

Let’s start imagining, dreaming up the possibilities… and if we’re smart enough, try to realise them. My mind’s already going a hundred miles an hour. What would you build if you had access to the best of both worlds ?!

*yasu - Yet Another (……y) Start-Up