User:JohnPritchard/drafts/Web operating system

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In metacomputing, WebOS and Web operating system are terms that describe network services for internet scale distributed computing, as in the WebOS Project at UC Berkeley [1], and the WOS Project [2]. In both cases the scale of the web operating system extends across the internet, like the web.

However, the terms WebOS and Web operating system have been employed more broadly and with far greater popularity in the context of "the web as in HTTP", and for many meanings ranging from singular systems to collections of systems [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]. In April of 2002, Tim O'Reilly spoke of "the emergent Internet operating system" as an open collection of Web services [10].

Common to all uses, a Web operating system is distinct from Internet Operating Systems in that it is independent of the traditional individual computer operating system. This conception of the system reflects an evolution of research in the field of operating systems into the increasingly minimized (for example, TinyOS and Exokernel) and distributed (for example, Inferno), and for distributed systems increasingly defined in terms of the specification of their network protocols more than their implementations (for example, Plan9's 9P).

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[edit] WebOS Project

The WebOS Project is a computing research project started at the University of California, Berkeley to develop suitable software development abstractions for applications that run over a network. The abstractions it provides include:

  • a filesystem that identifies data by uniform resource locators
  • a location-independent resource naming system
  • secure remote execution
  • secure data access
  • fail-safe transactions

Research on WebOS has continued at Duke University[11], the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Washington.

The conception of the web operating system in the WebOS project can be characterized as a finite or catalogued collection of services.

[edit] History

WebOS gained popularity in 1999 when a much touted start up, WebOS Inc. (at first known as MyWebOS [12]), was founded by Berkeley grad Shervin Pishevar and Emory grad Drew Morris. WebOS licensed the WebOS technologies from Duke University and University of Texas (Austin) and recruited Dr. Amin Vahdat, Professor of Computer Science at Duke, who had pioneered the WebOS technologies at University of California at Berkeley where he got his PhD on his WebOS research. WebOS acquired WebOS.org, which was created by a young Swedish programmer, Fredrik Malmer, who had created the first online desktop environment. Soon after, some of the top DHTML and Javascript programmers in the world such as Erik Arvidsson of WebFx fame, Dan Steinman, creator of the Dynamic Duo Cross-browser DHTML API, joined WebOS. WebOS raised over $10 million in financing from Impact Venture Partners led by Adam Dell and Grotech Capital. WebOS was launched with a vision of created the first web operating system complete with a WebOS API allowing developers to create Windows-like web applications that worked an extremely fast speeds by caching much of the code in the local browser. Arvidsson later launched Bindows, a framework very similar to the WebOS API, that does much of this and is used by many large companies and the US Military. WeBOS filed the first very WebOS patents in 1999. WebOS competed with another start up, Desktop.com, which was aimed more at the consumer market. WebOS was covered by many media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, financial Times, LA Times, Power lunch on CNBC, Fox News and CNN and helped spread the WebOS meme further. WebOS launched Hyperoffice, a full office suite, back in 1999.

[edit] WOS Project

In the context of the WOS Project, the web operating system is conceived of as a dynamic or ever changing collection of services [13] [14] [15] [16] [17].

“ The WOS (Web Operating System) is a joint project of four universities that aims at developing an operating system for the Web on top of existing operating systems and making the native services internet wide available. ”
 
— Simon Schubiger and Béat Hirsbrunner, WebCom: Automatic software configuration for the WOS [16] [17]

[edit] Webtop

A web desktop or webtop is a network application system for integrating web applications into a web based work space. It is a virtual desktop on the web, running in a web browser. A webtop delivers an environment for using compatible web based applications [18].

Some characterize webtops as instances of a web operating system, while others may believe that webtops have far too little in common with the current state of the art in the evolution of the operating system to merit this usage. The webtop has evolved into a thin layer of the web infrastructure for composing an application or work space, as opposed to the distributed evolution of operating systems such as the evolution expressed in the generations from Unix through Plan9 and into Inferno.

The webtop is a center of activity for the Office 2.0 [19] online workspace.

[edit] Evolution

Web 1.0 webtops are systems that present web applications running on the webtop server. The implementation of each application is entirely or largely specific to the webtop system.

Web 2.0 webtops are systems with minimal compatible application code (for example in XML with embedded HTML and JavaScript) running from the webtop server. This approach permits the webtop application to be a slim web graphical user interface to any other web 2.0 application.

[edit] Technologies

The Web 2.0 evolution separates the Graphical User Interface from the application service using an XML based interaction interface rather than serving the Graphical User Interface directly as in Web 1.0 applications. In this model there are many possible client side (browser) technologies for implementing the Graphical User Interface, likewise any one application can have many different Graphical User Interfaces originating from many different sources.

  • HTML and JavaScript are the most common.
  • Adobe / Macromedia Flash is very nice, and often called Rich Interactive Application (RIA).
  • Java Applet can of course perform this role.
  • Any desktop application can also work with a web service.

[edit] Examples

Examples of webtops include the following.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Amin Vahdat. WebOS: Operating System Services for Wide Area Applications.
  2. ^ Peter Kropf and John Plaice and Herwig Unger. Towards a Web Operating System.
  3. ^ youOS. What the heck is a web operating system?.
  4. ^ Richard MacManus. What is a WebOS?.
  5. ^ Jason Kottke. GoogleOS? YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS?.
  6. ^ eyeos.org. Open Source Web Desktop Environment, commonly known as Web Operating System (Web OS) or Web Office.
  7. ^ John Battelle. All the world's a platform.
  8. ^ Marshall Kirkpatrick. DesktopTwo offers a powerful web desktop for free.
  9. ^ Blogs tagged WebOS via Technorati
  10. ^ Tim O'Reilly. Inventing the Future.
  11. ^ [http://www.cs.duke.edu/ari/issg/webos/ WebOS at Duke University
  12. ^ Press release for the extinct 'myWebOS.com'.
  13. ^ Slim Ben Lamine and John Plaice and Peter Kropf. Problems Of Computing On The Web.
  14. ^ Peter G. Kropf. Overview Of The WOS Project.
  15. ^ Ioana Banicescu and Herwig Unger. Running Scientific Computations In A Web Operating System Environment.
  16. ^ a b Simon Schubiger and Béat Hirsbrunner, Department of Informatics, University of Fribourg. Automatic Software Configuration for the WOS.
  17. ^ a b Simon Schubiger. Automatic Software Configuration.
  18. ^ Table of webtop vs desktop comparisons.
  19. ^ Ismael Ghalimi. Introduction to Office 2.0.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Existent webOS communities

[edit] Beta/alpha/planning webOS