Filesystem for web app?

Ajax is hot. Some people even claimed that web applications, or web apps, based on this technology will one day dominate the market. Many people retold Sun’s motto some years ago: "Network is the computer." And suddenly, Google, with its rich "lab" of web apps, becomes the most threatening enemy of Microsoft.

For security reason, browsers, and hence web apps, cannot access to your local files. Some say this is a critical limitation of web apps. But who needs local files if most of your apps are web-based? Actually, web apps nowadays normally allow you to open/save files located in their own domain.

However, cross-domain file access is usually not supported. For example, the photos you saved in Flickr cannot be accessed from Writely. Well, Flickr is popular, so some web apps, mostly blog systems, do allow you to read or write from it. But this is in a rather ad hoc fashion. Why isn’t there a "web filesystem" that other web apps can access to easily?

Google is a company (if not the only company) that has the ability to provide such service globally. In fact, I am writing this blog because I have the feelings that Google Base is actually heading to this direction. Imagine there is an API such that data can be import/export from the Base in the format of, say, XML through the HTTPS protocol. Then other web apps can use it to read/write "files" to this universal "filesystem"! Moreover, the API would allow web apps to extract metadata instead of just the file itself. This is even more useful, I think! Not to mention the ability to search, efficiently.

Of course, security is a big issue that must be examined very, very carefully, because you are authorizing whatever web app to access to a pool of data owned by you. But this doesn’t stop me from getting excited about this very idea!

Let me make a bolder statement: the main battle of the war between Microsoft and Google is actually WinFS vs. Google Base! Microsoft, inherently favors local applications, invests heavily in this next generation, database-driven local filesystem; while Google, being the most powerful web company in the World, puts its bet on the data generated by rich web applications. Woo! I would really like to see the strategies they will use to win this war!

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Posted in: Google