What is the Cloud, really?
When people speak about The Cloud, what they are really talking about is a gigantic hard drive somewhere in the rainbow (or probably in a dusty datacenter). And when I listen words as Web App what I really hear is “an application that for the large part now runs in the browser with tons and tons and tons of javascript” as you can see looking at the code of their pages.
Now. That’s not what I have in my mind when I imagine Cloud Computing the way it should be.
Cloud Computing, the way it should be
In my mind, we should have a thing similar to the browser, that should receive messages from The Cloud and reacts consequently: displaying, rotating, moving things on the screen of my computer. Or an iPad if you prefer. But without all the javascript mess. It should all happens in the browser’s kernel, completely transparent to the user.
Just imagine The Cloud now.
Somewhere (we don’t know where) The Cloud receives data from computers from all over the world. Data we enter our New Browsers and data representing what we are seeing at the moment and the actions we perform on the screen. The Cloud then sends messages to our machines informing them on what they have to display, hide, modify. These messages are elaborated by the New Browsers without any possible client scripting elaboration.
All the computing happening on the client-side now (javascript powered) would than happens in the browser (for the display side) and in the server side for ALL the logic.
And without refreshing the page, in an asynchronous way, our New Browser would perform, as a very dumb client, all the operations requested from The Cloud.
That’s THE CLOUD.