[CAnet - news] Grid 2.0 gets hip with web services Web 2.0

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[Excellent article on the future of grid, web services, SOA and Web 2.0.
Some excerpts from Grid Today -- BSA]

www.gridToday.com



Grid 2.0: The Global Grid Gets Hip
              

  The buzz from the Bay Area to Beijing is the programming phenomenon 
  known as "Web 2.0." 

  Perhaps as important, these new applications -- from GoogleEarth to 
  iTunes, and the legal version of Napster or Flickr -- demonstrate the 
  power of service-oriented IT. These applications are modular, based on 
  re-usable components that use Web services and Java along with a slew 
  of new development tools aimed at simplicity. They cost significantly 
  less to build and are much easier to modify than legacy applications 
  or their "Web 1.0" predecessors that would attempt to deliver the same 
  functionality. 
  
  The founders of 37signals, who   developed the open source development
tool Ruby on Rails for the Web   2.0 community, just wrote a book, called
Getting Real, that describes   their approach. The net is that they don't
spend more than three and a   half months on any of their applications
before they launch.
  
  A word to the IT community: Rich functionality is being developed with 
  so few programmers (usually five or so) in such a short period of time 
  (three to four months), venture capitalists can't figure out how to 
  fund them. Because they live on the Web, they can update any errata on 
  the fly as users engage and use the applications. They may never get 
  out of "Beta," and no one may care because the Beta works just fine. 
  
  Web 2.0 is a game-changing approach to developing new application 
  functionality based on service-oriented architecture.
  
    
  Grid 2.0 will usher in a new world of 
  distributed ubiquitous virtual computing, networking and storage in 
  the enterprise that will allow a whole raft of new rich services. I 
  started to see this coming with the demographics at SC'05 in Seattle. 
  The scientists were being outnumbered by folks usually associated with 
  content or content delivery.
  
  I'll steal some concepts from Tim O'Reilly, who coined the term "Web 
  2.0," and argue that Grid 2.0 describes the infrastructure that Google 
  uses to deliver the rich user interface for GoogleEarth -- which, 
  along with Wikipedia, is one the most popular examples of Web 2.0. 
  However, the clear winner for user volume is MySpace. "Now wait," some 
  diehards might argue. "MySpace doesn't use a grid." I'll argue that it 
  most certainly does. It uses a data grid. Grid 1.0 was all about 
  computing, and Grid 2.0 is a blend of distributed computing and shared 
  data.
  
  In fact, it will be my premise that Grid 2.0 represents the model for 
  infrastructure that will support rich Web 2.0 applications. It'll also 
  be my premise that the distinction between Web 2.0 applications and 
  the early Web applications is analogous to the difference between Grid 
  2.0 infrastructure and the initial Grid implementations.
  
  
  It's all about the data. The core of Web 2.0 -- whether Napster, 
  GoogleEarth, Amazon, eBAY or Flickr -- is that they all build the 
  application functionality around the data and how it will be used.
  
  This last point is huge, and a big item for Grid 2.0 and the 
  implications on truly simple service-oriented IT. Many of the Grid 
  practitioners have known this for years and have worked feverishly 
  toward a data grid where the data, along with the computing, is 
  ubiquitous.
 
  So, if Grid 1.0 was all about sharing compute power, Grid 2.0 is all 
  about sharing data, and the compute power, networking and storage 
  needed to access and use that data. 
  
  Sometimes I worry that the IT community won't move fast enough to 
  escape the gravity of legacy computing architectures that don't scale, 
  are underutilized and cost far too much to build and maintain. The 
  recent explosion of energy and investment in the Web 2.0 development 
  model gives me hope that we may get into orbit after all. To achieve 
  critical velocity, we will need a robust infrastructure based on Grid 
  2.0 to act as the booster rocket.
  
  
 

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These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.



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