Assembling a Rich Internet Application

After my rant yesterday, I’m realizing how incredibly close we are to significantly greater capability to have we run-of-the-mill, non-programmers assemble and deliver our own rich internet applications.

Remember Tom Cruise in Minority Report? Everyone always points to the RFID-like recognition the advertisement had of him as he ran from the cops (the ad greeted him by name). What I recall is when he was researching data in real-time by manipulating it in space with his hands. THAT is what I hope to have next year: a page layout-like ability to place images, text, and chunks of functionality into a seamless whole.

Let’s take a look at where we are right now:

• Portal applications like Pageflakes, NetVibes, Protopage and others allow drag-n-drop of RSS-fed news and content as well as nice chunks of functionality like weather, time, search, movie listings and more. These are primarily personal portals…though Pageflakes allows the assemblage of public pages

• Widgets and Gadgets are exploding in number and functionality. Widgetbox and Google Gadgets are the two most prominent, non-desktop (like Yahoo Widgets or Apple’s Dashboard Widgets) pieces of functionality that a user could assemble on to a page, blog, or site

• Mashups are exploding in popularity. I haven’t checked until this evening (received an email from a friend exploring building a mashup application) and I was stunned with the huge array of them at ProgrammableWeb.

All of this is made possible by the accelerating number of Web-based, hosted applications that have exposed their inner workings with an Application Programming Interface (API).

What’s missing from all of this?

Desktop publishing-like assembly and delivery of an end product. Designers demand pixel-level precision in the placement of images, text and the control of look-n-feel. This means that goofy borders, gaudy graphics and an inability to customize widgets or gadgets to fit an end application won’t fly.

Imagine you could have a drag-n-drop assembly program that would enable you to quickly deliver enormous functionality specifically focused on the client, market or product you were trying to create?

We’re close.

As I’ve used higher level tools like the simplistic Apple iWeb (while comparing it to, for example, Google Pages) I had a huge “Aha!” Google is a left-brain bunch of engineers that seem to have no concept or appreciation for design. Everything they deliver is function over form.

Next we have Apple who completely and totally “gets it” when it comes to design. I’d put Adobe in that camp too (but would digress too much in this post), and you can see evidence of that in everything they touch be it an iPod, an application or the fact that MILLIONS of people are now using unix for God’s sake! (Since they’ve delivered an awesome user interface over unix).

I predict that we’ll see iWeb quickly become the page layout program for mini-Web application functionality for personal and small business Web delivery. Obviously there will be more robust approaches like Adobe’s Apollo project, Microsoft Expression, Laszlo and other approaches.

Further I predict that 2007 is going to see an acceleration in rich internet applications, enabling tools to deliver a new wave of Web applications and more.