Way back in 1977 when a working group on Distributed Systems at ANSI was asked to work on OSI Model (Open Systems Interconnection Basic Reference Model) - they had little idea that the concept of distributed systems would one day grow to create the mother of all 'distributed systems' - the Internet.
Technically the internet is a massive network of hardware - but conceptually, its a platform (or a cloud if you prefer) upon which Software Services can run seamlessly making it transparent to the users, where the software is running, where the data comes from, which hardware is serving server cycles ... and so on.
All this abstraction is possible today only because of the well designed OSI Model which separates the "Presentation" from data and network from the underlying hardware. The OSI model has also helped to come up with protocols like TCP which have made compatibility a non-issue when it comes to connecting computers across the world (which run on different hardware, different Operating systems, different Web Server software etc).
Compare the web with the Mobile world and you will realize how standardization can make life easier. On mobiles, we have a dichotomy of everything - from battery chargers to Operating systems, to mobile web browsers to even Business Card formats.
Anyway - the moot point is that OSI Model has served us well in creating a uniform and interconnected world. And it has enabled create a platform on which several software services run today.
So what next? The world of web services has itself become very complicated - your email sits on the office mail server as well as Yahoo/GMail; your documents are distributed across your desktop, Yahoo! briefcase, Google Docs, blogs and wikis; your photographs are stored on your hard-disk, flickr, photobucket and orkut profile; your people network starts from your phonebook, and email and extends to orkut + linkedin + facebok + Ryze etc.
Given the above situation, you don't have to be a scientist to predict that for the internet enabled lifestyle of tomorrow - integration between the multiple web services will be key. Fortunately, there are efforts going on in this direction which I will cover in my next post.
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Technically the internet is a massive network of hardware - but conceptually, its a platform (or a cloud if you prefer) upon which Software Services can run seamlessly making it transparent to the users, where the software is running, where the data comes from, which hardware is serving server cycles ... and so on.
All this abstraction is possible today only because of the well designed OSI Model which separates the "Presentation" from data and network from the underlying hardware. The OSI model has also helped to come up with protocols like TCP which have made compatibility a non-issue when it comes to connecting computers across the world (which run on different hardware, different Operating systems, different Web Server software etc).
Compare the web with the Mobile world and you will realize how standardization can make life easier. On mobiles, we have a dichotomy of everything - from battery chargers to Operating systems, to mobile web browsers to even Business Card formats.
Anyway - the moot point is that OSI Model has served us well in creating a uniform and interconnected world. And it has enabled create a platform on which several software services run today.
So what next? The world of web services has itself become very complicated - your email sits on the office mail server as well as Yahoo/GMail; your documents are distributed across your desktop, Yahoo! briefcase, Google Docs, blogs and wikis; your photographs are stored on your hard-disk, flickr, photobucket and orkut profile; your people network starts from your phonebook, and email and extends to orkut + linkedin + facebok + Ryze etc.
Given the above situation, you don't have to be a scientist to predict that for the internet enabled lifestyle of tomorrow - integration between the multiple web services will be key. Fortunately, there are efforts going on in this direction which I will cover in my next post.
.
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