Many developers have to write web content that strives to provide the usability and responsiveness of an application running on an operating system like Windows or any of the many cool Linux distributions, but I really don’t think its going to happen.
Some have built plugins which operate embedded in the html in order to enhance the experience, some use clever little tricks like AJAX; but for me, it’s just not enough.

We are in the digital broadband age, and network speeds are only going to get faster. Isn’t it time we had a new protocol for our browsers to take sensible advantage of this?

HTTP is what it says, HyperTEXT (Text with hyperlinks in it) transfer protocol.
FTP gives us File Transfer Protocol.
There are oodles of protocols out there, but so far, nothing that really delivers applications from the web in a way that’s easy to develop and easy to deploy, without http or any hanger-on plugins or embedded doo-dahs.

Let’s call our new toy ATP, Application Transfer Protocol.
We want to deliver applications to our users over the web, but we want them to be as good as an OS application. We want our work to be secure and compiled.
How cool would it be to write an application, compile it, and upload it; then open a browser to atp://www.my_web_app.com (whose default app would be myapp.exe or myapp.iap or whatever the extension would be).

We don’t want to download the whole thing remember, so the protocol would interact with the application on the server side, and deliver the application in an ‘on demand’ bases.
Use the OS libraries available for standard OS applications, to build and manage the program GUI with event handlers, and all the nice things that benefit a locally running application.

Now were delivering REAL cloud applications straight from our servers without the need for local installs. The applications can have a local folder on the users computer to store settings etc, and write user files to the users folders just like a regular app.

Let’s stop talking about it. Somebody built it. Heck, maybe I’ll find the time over the next few years to build it myself. This would be the real internet revolution.

Happy browsing,
Allan Mackinnon