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XJAX Update

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Quite a lot has been going on in the world of XJAX lately. I thought I would share some of it with you.

First of all, I'm busy working on the next version of batBack, my proprietary program to do distributed non-structured text evaluation. That's coming along well! Originally, I thought version 2.0 would be more of a generic blog toolbox, but as it turns out, there are a lot of companies "poaching" on my space. I have read of a couple over the last month doing universal toolboxes. Since i don't have unlimited resources, I thought it would be better to go back to content organization and retrieval. I have some prototype screens up, and some neat ideas to share when I get ready.

There's an interesting blog entry over on a blog called Mukund which talks about identifying users without the use of cookies. Seeing as how I have had about a dozen users complain about missing functionality when they have cookies turned off, this seems like an interesting idea to chase. While I understand some people wanting to lock down their computers as much as possible, overall I think this is a losing game. It's like the radar vs. radar detector wars in the consumer sector, only on side has all of the cards. A totally secure computer is a totally useless one. I really do not envy security administrators: their job is getting harder by the week.

Over the last year, I've been in contact with a few other guys like me who are working on a universal web operating system using XJAX (although they did not use that name.) As a couple of them have noted, this is going to change the nature of the internet in a big way. For instance, your blog provider may just provide a text-storage facility for your posts: you may have another provider take care of handling your comments, and several other providers taking care of adding bells and whistles to your sites. In the commercial sector, companies can deploy core business practices as XJAX services that can plug into web sites in all kinds of neat ways. Let's say you run a used car lot. You could provide an XJAX tool that let's users review your inventory and make an offer. Another company may provide insurance quotes in a similar manner. Yet another company may provide financing. If you are putting together a blog entry about buying cars in your local area, you could easily add a set of tools for buying, insuring, and financing the car, all without having to write any code at all! It will certainly make the web more immediate and useful to most people.

So it's really good that in a year the market has picked up on the XJAX ideas and ran with it. If you mention dynamic script tags or JSON today, a lot more developers know what you are talking about as opposed to even six months ago. I don't know how far along many of these companies are -- after all, I'm on version 2.0 of my tools and some of this stuff you couldn't find ANYWHERE a year ago -- so we'll see. In the meantime, it will be fun to watch how it all turns out!

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This page contains a single entry by DanielBMarkham published on September 18, 2006 3:04 PM.

Some Math Students Are Not As Good As Others was the previous entry in this blog.

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