It took a minute to wrap my head around it, but this thing has really got me thinking: http://www.linkedprocess.org/ http://www.linkedprocess.org/ Summary: XMP

It took a minute to wrap my head around it, but this thing has really got me thinking: http://www.linkedprocess.org/ http://www.linkedprocess.org/ Summary: XMPP extension protocol to create remote VMs and inject code into them, language agnostic, asynchronous (you can leave the job running). Until now, when I heard "distributed computing", I thought of number crunching, protein folding, etc. which doesn't excite me. But think of it this way: with a ubiquitous system like this, you are effectively decoupling applications from resources. Instead of inventing formats to serialize data, or protocols to transfer it around, or RPC schemes to provide remote services, you just make everything available locally in a sandboxed VM. Consumers inject code to assemble and transfer just the data they need, when they need it, with the power to deal with whatever constraints the network places on their particular use case. Creating local APIs, in practice, is vastly easier than creating network protocols, especially when it comes to cooperation and standards. So... move the cooperation boundary to the easy part of the pipeline.