Thursday, April 5, 2007

Phobos Appeal And Killer Apps

I haven't had time to work with Phobos this week, but I am hoping to design an Ajax layout for a simple forum soon.
In my mind's wandering this week I was thinking about how Phobos could appeal to and be adopted on a large scale. A few things came to mind. It must appeal to the average scripter by providing easy data access to open source databases. It must be supported by web hosts as the average scripter is not using a dedicated server. It also must be marketed as a scripting platform that has ease of use as well as stability and speed.
At this point, I think if a developer takes the time to explore Phobos, they will see that it is a very conducive scripting platform. You can essentially plug in any scripting language and modify the platform to your needs. The database access is easy, but it does require the NetBeans IDE to avoid writing Java code.
Support by web hosts should be easy. Java web hosting is much more common than it was five years ago and is just as cheap as any other hosting. A web host could even market a solution as a javascript server platform. They could bundle in a few specific Java objects and deploy a basic Phobos web app. The customer could script their solution right inside Phobos without ever needing to deploy a web app or know what it is. This should also cure the reasoning of some that Java in a shared environment is not as stable as PHP. As long as Phobos doesn't hiccup, errors in code shouldn't matter.
The killer app for Phobos as a platform would be a Visual IDE. The JMaki project is really exciting from the fact that you can create your own components using simple text tools such as html, css and then of course javascript. This combined with the simplicity of Phobos is very powerful. The killer app would be if Netbeans had a visual layout screen similar to the NetBeans Visual WebPack or Visual Studio, but instead of custom controls written for an IDE, you could use Jmaki controls. Then the average web developer could create their own components for visual layout as well as script their pages.
After this was done the next killer app would be to be able to wrap Phobos up into a single window application with the embedded browser engine. Like the Gecko engine from FireFox. You would be able to write a desktop application with a scripting language using html widgets and of course it would be Internet enabled as it could make calls to servers or databases. You would also have a built in database engine for desktop apps using Derby. Now with one stack, you can write desktop apps, web apps, or Ajax apps with a scripting language, and these apps would be cross platform.
Phobos presents lots of possibilities.

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