Archive for March, 2007

Evolution of Dekoh idea

March 22, 2007 at 10:45 pm · Filed under Dekoh, Desktop, New Products, Platforms, Rich Internet Application, User Experience, web 2.0

Jay Fortner wrote this article  on Read/Write web.  One observation he made was “…makes it hard to describe what Dekoh is in a sentence”. He is probably right to some extent because Dekoh offers several different things, at a first glance it appears it is doing too many things. That got me thinking about how Dekoh evolved…..Here is the story.

In middle of 2005, few of us at Pramati were discussing about development skills needed for desktop applications development and web applications development. We started to think why should it be so different? How about creating something to merge the two. Chandru played a prank, he created a one-page brochure (pdf) of a product called “Butterfly” that did everything we were thinking and sent it the next day to Jay (CEO). That was the first seed of Dekoh. We made a quick prototype (project codenamed Butterfly)….and story continues. Now coming to the point of one sentence description…

The problem statement we started with was a single sentence “Creating platform to provide seamless user experience for desktop and web applications”. This is stated in the press release. Now, trying to create the platform required bringing the best features of desktop and web together which people are used to, I have explained it in this post. When you try to create a platform, it needs to be beaten up by developers to put the right features in and make sure it is usable. We don’t have the luxury of existing developer base as Adobe, nor can we convince ebay to try our platform before it is popular. So we started eating our own dog food and started writing applications (like photos, music, books, calendar…). Another reason to write such elaborate applications rather than eye candy demos is to make it usable to end users. I am sure developers who adopt Dekoh will come up with smarter and cooler applications, but for initial users Dekoh applications are very compelling.

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Dekoh Photos screencast

March 21, 2007 at 12:45 am · Filed under Dekoh, Desktop, Platforms, Rich Internet Application, web 2.0

I made my first attempt at recording a video! The demo shows Dekoh photos application features. This is a AJAX application running on the desktop. Some highlights:

1. Tagging, commenting, sharing features come as part of the platform, it is not coded in the photos application. Dekoh portal API and widgets are used to get this functionality into the Photos application

2. The personal server running on the desktop is bound to local port. No one can connect to your desktop from anywhere directly, even if you had a public IP address, opened all ports or had another machine on the same subnet. So it is fully secure.

3. Front end is Javascript and AJAX. Backend is Servlet/JSP/Java.  Application size is about 2mb to download and on disk after install about 4mb.

4. Tagging saves tags onto the picture IPTC/EXIF block. So if you upload the picture to Flickr, you can still see the tags.

5. Unlike a traditional web based application, you can see that Photos application has access to local filesystem (see import feature, tag/meta data editing).

6. Photos application runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. On IE, Firefox and Safari browsers. I heard there are some browser issues on Linux at this point.

Feedback/Suggestions/Comments welcome :) .

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Sun Mashup event

March 20, 2007 at 12:10 pm · Filed under Sun, web 2.0

I was at the Sun Mashup Event this afternoon. It was a semi-formal discussion/debate between Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies at Sun and Michael Arrington of Techcrunch. The topics included Web 2.0 and venture capital mainly.

There were some interesting thoughts and debate around Web 2.0 definition, is web 2.0 a new concept that did not exist earlier and phrase ‘user generated content’ (Tim said he is niether a “user” nor generating “content”).

Both Tim and Mike agreed that it was difficult to define Web 2.0. Mike felt, in 2005 he did notice that the web had changed from the way it used to be pre-bubble burst. However, Tim beleives technology wise all web 2.0 concepts existed earlier.

Here is my 2 bits to the above topics:

1. In a pub-sub paradigm Web 1.0 was only ’subscribe to web’ (read only). Web 2.0 is both publish and subscribe (read-write). I know its little too techy way of explaining :) .

 2. Markup languages and HTTP are much older than the Web 1.0 boom (1998 onwards), similar is the case with Web 2.0 concepts (2005 onwards). Technology comes to mainstream notice only after adoption by a critical mass. So Web 2.0 is old from a technology standpoint but new from adoption standpoint.

3. ‘user generated content’ in its minimal definition is your ‘picture’ or ‘video’ or ‘blog’ (base content). The popularity (diggs?), related items (tags) and the interaction between people with similar interests (comments) around the base content adds equal value or more to the base content. This as a whole in my opionion is the ‘user generated content’ not just the base content.

My final thougths on Sun organizing this type of event and benefit to them:

I understand Sun wants startups to use their hardware and software. I doubt it benefits Sun in any ways if small startups (small user base, pre-VC) use their hardware and software. They are either trying to buy loyalty or they are trying to lock-in.

Argument for loyalty – Sun hardware and software works like a charm so I would go with Sun as I scale up (turning out to be the next YouTube or Flickr). Argument for lock-in  is  “Oh damn!” I have built my software on Sun and now I am stuck, I have to continue to invest in Sun.

I hope Sun is counting on “loyalty” (hard to find these days). Because, lock-in is even harder. Most startups re-write their software when they start to scale-up. It is quite unlikely they can afford to write it the right way first time around.

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Bringing the best of Desktop and Web together

March 12, 2007 at 9:37 pm · Filed under Dekoh, Desktop, New Products, Platforms, Rich Internet Application, SAAS, Web Services, web 2.0

The main idea of Dekoh is to bring the best of features on Desktop and Web to end users and developers. Jay in his presentation had a nice slide that captures this.

Best of Desktop and Web

Here is a brief description:

Universal Data: Applications can blend data on their file system with data on the web (website APIs) in their applications.

Control over sharing: While desktop is a fully private environment, the concept of social web is community based sharing. Dekoh desktop applications can be shared thru Dekoh Network. It is your private network.

Benefits of a hosted application: Desktop applications are self contained and rich in user interface (also easy to install and manage). Deploying and managing web applications is a little geeky job (folks in enterprise software world know this, the reason why SaaS model is becoming popular). Dekoh camouflages all the complexity. Installing and running Dekoh desktop and applications is just a one-click operation. It is totally end consumer usable.

Bringing web 2.0 to desktop: Use your personal media (photos, music, video, blogs, books….) and collaborate with your personal network. Run your web applications on the desktop

Developer friendly: Dekoh is based on open standards and is an open source platform. Developers with wide ranging skills like HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flash, Java, JSP/Servlet, PHP, .Net can write applications on their desktop and share it over the web securely (Read FAQ). More exited? participate in Dekoh development by joining the Dekoh community

End user applications: End consumers can install Dekoh Applications and organize their personal media and share it with their personal network.

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Dekoh press meet in Bangalore

March 5, 2007 at 2:59 pm · Filed under Dekoh, Desktop, India, Rich Internet Application

Some exciting interaction at the press meet today. Technology journalists had a lot of questions about Dekoh — mostly to do with the seamless movement between the web and desktop that Dekoh promises — , and were eager to get their hands on the new product. The expectations are clearly rising. Check out the media presentation here. And a photo from the meet.

Bhaskar Pramanik (managing director, Sun Microsystems India) and Professor Sadagopan (director, IIITB) were guests at the press meet.

Update: All major news papers (Bangalore editions) carried Dekoh news on March 6th. See some clippings on Flickr:

Dekoh press clippings

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Architecture of a Desktop RIA platform

March 3, 2007 at 9:01 am · Filed under Dekoh, Desktop, Platforms, Rich Internet Application, web 2.0

There are many pieces to the puzzle of building an integrated desktop and web application platform. Ted has interesting posting today on this and Ryan has also commented on it.

Here is my opinion on what the architecture of such a platform could be and approaches taken by Dekoh and Apollo (from Adobe).

1. Cross-OS base: Required to run the same application software on multiple OS platforms. Adobe has picked Flex/Flash runtime and Dekoh is built on Java runtime. More here on why a RIA envinronment should be cross-platform.

2. Common desktop-web UI: Pure web and desktop-web hybrid applications
should be rendered using same UI elements. Adobe has integrated a browser built with Webkit. Dekoh lets you use your favorite browser to view both type applications.

3. Application model and choice of languages: The core of the application (‘application/business logic’) needs wide range of services (application model). Apollo provides Apollo runtime and programming using Flex or ActionScript for this. Dekoh applications can be written using JSP, Servlet or simply plain Java. Other engines like .Net or PHP may also be used through thin connectivity layer such as Java-COM bridge or PHP-bridge.

4. Platform Integration services: Providing a secure environment for applications and native services integration (like desktop icons, system tray…) is essential for applications running on the desktop. Adobe is doing this with Apollo services. On Dekoh this can be done through java wrappers like JDIC or native calls.

5. Community services. Since most hybrid application could be building on user-generated content, platform support for social networking could make application development easier. Apollo does not look to be providing this support, but Dekoh Network and web2.0 kind of facilities of Dekoh Desktop, provide community services to applications.

A technical comparison is posted on Dekoh website.


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