4 ms·

We seem to be heading for a future where every application is run in a virtualized OS, configured and launched on demand.

skrebbel 13y ago
We seem to be heading for a future where the only application run locally is a web browser.
- TheLegace 13y ago
  Ya I very much doubt that. It just looks more people who barely do anything productive are on the Internet just using Youtube and Netflix. While the people who are developing say something like Youtube(or god forbid something more useful and complicated) are left to fend for themselves, because hey what do they matter.
- tensor 13y ago
  We seem to be making the same unrealistically broad generalizations over and over, never learning from our past.
- kryptiskt 13y ago
  We seem to be heading for a future where every website says "Don't look at this, download our app!".
- Zigurd 13y ago
  There are at least three reasons that won't happen: 1. Horses for courses: Once you get past superficial similarity, the Web isn't a universal application runtime. It is more appropriate for some kinds of apps, such as publication media, form-filling, etc. than others, such as apps with fine-grained interactivity, apps with significant endpoint computation, etc. 2. Nobody has cracked the "write once, test everywhere" curse of multiple implementations of a standard, never mind a standard as complex, and with such a long legacy tail as Web browsers. Web app frameworks still devote a lot of code to compatibility. "Native" also means "a single vendor's runtime." 3. Operating systems are different, and there are varying approaches to portability. Running in a universal runtime is one approach, and it has inherent compromises. For example, Microsoft has applications for editing Office documents for Windows, Mac OS X, and for Web browsers. Which one has limitations both in terms of integrating OS features and UI conventions, and it terms of functionality?
PommeDeTerre 13y ago
The future you describe is the distant past for many of us. We've been using chroot, FreeBSD jails, Solaris Containers, and similar technologies for many years now. Combined with the basic functionality of UNIX and UNIX-like systems, we can quite safely isolate users, apps and data, but without the overhead and inconvenience of heavy-weight virtualization techniques. Even then, these techniques are quite new relative to what's been available to mainframe users for many decades.
- gngeal 13y ago
  This is all too primitive. If we're heading in the direction that the GP describes, it's probably because some people have realized a long time ago that Alan Kay was actually making sense when he was talking about the object-based computational model as being something like "small computers all the way down". If your application is a set of objects implementing the functionality by passing appropriate messages between those objects, and the OS is another set of objects, providing all the necessary interfaces to applications in form of capability-exposing objects, then everything is virtualized by definition. Or, in other words, in such a system, you can virtualize (in the classical sense) as much or as little as possible. Need two versions of the same library for two different applications? No problem, because each app gets its own inferface. One app needs to accesses a physical block device and another a virtual one? No problem, because each app gets its own inferface. Is the capability required by the app deployed on another machine and you want to expose it to the application transparently? No problem, because each app gets its own inferface. And if the current hardware isn't amenable to running such systems with ease, well, that might have something to do with the fact that everything we're running has its roots in the 1980s. The unprecedented success of the PC revolution has essentially frozen all development of substantially new systems.

skrebbel 13y ago

We seem to be heading for a future where the only application run locally is a web browser.

TheLegace 13y ago
Ya I very much doubt that. It just looks more people who barely do anything productive are on the Internet just using Youtube and Netflix. While the people who are developing say something like Youtube(or god forbid something more useful and complicated) are left to fend for themselves, because hey what do they matter.
tensor 13y ago
We seem to be making the same unrealistically broad generalizations over and over, never learning from our past.
kryptiskt 13y ago
We seem to be heading for a future where every website says "Don't look at this, download our app!".
Zigurd 13y ago
There are at least three reasons that won't happen: 1. Horses for courses: Once you get past superficial similarity, the Web isn't a universal application runtime. It is more appropriate for some kinds of apps, such as publication media, form-filling, etc. than others, such as apps with fine-grained interactivity, apps with significant endpoint computation, etc. 2. Nobody has cracked the "write once, test everywhere" curse of multiple implementations of a standard, never mind a standard as complex, and with such a long legacy tail as Web browsers. Web app frameworks still devote a lot of code to compatibility. "Native" also means "a single vendor's runtime." 3. Operating systems are different, and there are varying approaches to portability. Running in a universal runtime is one approach, and it has inherent compromises. For example, Microsoft has applications for editing Office documents for Windows, Mac OS X, and for Web browsers. Which one has limitations both in terms of integrating OS features and UI conventions, and it terms of functionality?

PommeDeTerre 13y ago

The future you describe is the distant past for many of us. We've been using chroot, FreeBSD jails, Solaris Containers, and similar technologies for many years now. Combined with the basic functionality of UNIX and UNIX-like systems, we can quite safely isolate users, apps and data, but without the overhead and inconvenience of heavy-weight virtualization techniques. Even then, these techniques are quite new relative to what's been available to mainframe users for many decades.

gngeal 13y ago
This is all too primitive. If we're heading in the direction that the GP describes, it's probably because some people have realized a long time ago that Alan Kay was actually making sense when he was talking about the object-based computational model as being something like "small computers all the way down". If your application is a set of objects implementing the functionality by passing appropriate messages between those objects, and the OS is another set of objects, providing all the necessary interfaces to applications in form of capability-exposing objects, then everything is virtualized by definition. Or, in other words, in such a system, you can virtualize (in the classical sense) as much or as little as possible. Need two versions of the same library for two different applications? No problem, because each app gets its own inferface. One app needs to accesses a physical block device and another a virtual one? No problem, because each app gets its own inferface. Is the capability required by the app deployed on another machine and you want to expose it to the application transparently? No problem, because each app gets its own inferface. And if the current hardware isn't amenable to running such systems with ease, well, that might have something to do with the fact that everything we're running has its roots in the 1980s. The unprecedented success of the PC revolution has essentially frozen all development of substantially new systems.