Topeka

Google has officially changed its name to Topeka. I found this link by "Topekaing" April Fools.

HTML5 Storage Complexity

With new emerging HTML5 standard, Google is focusing on using the standard for local, client-based data storage. Its nice to have some flexibility in the browser in terms of how data is stored and how to go about retrieving that data. Having a database API would no doubt help in that effort.

But is that getting too complex? Having a feature-rich data store in the web browser might take too much of the design focus away from the overall service architecture. Instead, I think it makes more sense to store URIs on the client. These URIs represent the potentially complex resource states that live on the server.

Chrome OS

There is a lot of hype around the new Google Chrome OS as of late as the source code has been released. There should be lots of hype around this new operating system because it is a new concept. Sure, there are net-books you can use for your light-weight web browsing purposes. But that doesn't really cut it if you have stuff to do.

The approach behind the Chrome OS is that it is a web browser that grew up into a light-weight operating system. The OS isn't concerned with running local desktop applications and can optimize for the web. I find this concept both interesting and frightening.

The idea of having a computer that I cannot use, in the conventional sense will most likely turn many people off. It is a little scary that none of your data is in your hands. With a conventional laptop, you can at least store whatever you want and carry it around with you. I wonder what Google will do if people don't like that idea of all their data being out of their hands. Not likely to happen.

Open Source Closure

Google has recently open-sourced it's javascript tools called Closure. It is this suite of tools that Google uses in every web application that it hosts. They claim to have made it available for download so that developers of other web applications have an opportunity to make the web faster as a whole. That sounds a bit to me like "hey, if you drop the javascript toolkit you are currently using and use ours, your application will be faster. yay!"

I don't necessarily buy it if that is the case. Sure, Google has nice, well-performing web applications that would certainly impress your customers if you could offer something similar. But this market is already flooded with good quality javasctipt toolkits. jQuery is tough to compete with for most intents and purposes.

One area that Closure has an advantage in is the fact that it is shipped with a javascript compiler, an area relatively unexplored. At most, the javascript of many application might be slightly compressed before it is served up to clients.

If you aren't already heavily invested in another javascript toolkit, closure may be worth looking at. If that, or any other kit for that matter, is the one you choose, stick with it. Don't mix and match javascript toolkits. You'll just be asking for trouble.