With the recent explosion of cloud computing services, developers now have more opportunities than ever to take advantage of enterprise-scale computing platforms. However, most cloud computing services, such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), have unique and incompatible APIs. This has provided a challenge for organizations wanting to develop in-house applications that can later be seamlessly deployed directly to Amazon’s service when necessary. For example, Ubuntu Server, a Linux-based operating system supported by Europe’s Canonical Ltd, is the most widely deployed operating system on EC2, yet there has been no way for developers to create private, EC2-compatible cloud computing systems internally with Ubuntu.
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and several other companies (including several startups) have released various specifications and standards as part of the release of a new licensing agreement by the Open Web Foundation (OWF). The newOpen Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa) is a licensing agreement aimed at streamlining innovation by making it easy for a variety of entities to open source standards and specifications in a straightforward and easy manner.
Several enterprise mashup proponents, including ProgrammableWeb, have come together to form the new Open Mashup Alliance (OMA). The OMA has been founded with the goal of supporting the implementation of enterprise mashups along with an open language that promotes enterprise mashup interoperability and portability.
Today at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, DC: the Federal Government is announcing they will be implementing OpenID and Info Cards as part of its open government initiative. The looming adoption of these two standards paves the way for citizens to use existing accounts and online identities (such as their Yahoo or Google accounts) to participate in various government web sites. This also means that citizens can customize their experience on government websites without needing to reveal any personally identifiable information – including passwords.
Scrapplet, a service that’s a cross between a Netvibes-style start page builder and a browser-based mashup environment, this week released a set of new features for integrating web-based content within the browser. The basic service allows users to build their own web pages by dragging-and-dropping content like text, video, widgets, feeds, etc from other web sites.
Google has announced some new features available for its OpenID API. As some of our readers may remember, earlier this year Google released a “Hybrid Protocol” API that combines an OpenID federated login with OAuth access authorization. The API has been enhanced with some extended Attribute Exchange fields and a pop-up user interface for the user-facing approval page.
For the past few months, the API of microblog site Twitter has been used as the basis for many popular and creative mashups. Now Facebook, with the launch of its highly anticipated Open Stream API, is attempting to gain some attention as a platform for social networking applications.
If you are not familiar with the Google Documents List Data API (our Documents List Data API Profile), it allows client applications to upload documents to Google Documents and list them in the form of Google Data API (“GData”) feeds. Until recently, the API enabled users to download files in their original format, but the developer community was active in requesting exporting capabilities, and today developers can use the API to download documents in a variety of formats including PDF, Microsoft Word, SWF, RTF, and Open Document Format.
Taking another innovative step on the path of opening-up, Yahoo! now now supports microformats through its Yahoo! Query Language (YQL). Microformats are one of the most under appreciated ways in which web sites can make their existing service into a development platform. By using existing HTML standards and adding a small layer of semantic data to already-existing web pages, sites can enable a range of innovation on top of their existing service. As noted on microformats.org:
One of the big debates these days when it comes to cloud computing center around portability and interoperatbilty between providers. That is, if you build an application on Amazon’s EC2 or Google’s AppEngine or Force.com, or store your data on Box.net or Amazon’s S3, how hard is it to port your application or move your data to another cloud provider? If you develop on a given platform, how locked-in, or not, are you? And beyond that, could developers benefit from having standardized APIs to develop to without having to learn a new model and interface each time. As you’d expect, there’s no easy answer to this.
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