webr3.org

I could burst in to a long post about the importance of universality, or even go in depth about the incredibly liberating experience of writing a library that works on both the client and the server, and indeed the many benefits of both of these combined - but I won't for now.

As we all know, one of the biggest hindrances to innovation in the various areas of computer science is the human brain, and specifically the tendency to think inside, rather than outside the box. There are things we never even consider or imagine because we just can't think outside of what we already know/presume - a small percentage of gifted individuals can, but on the whole, we as humans/geeks/programmers cannot.

To keep this short and simple, let's return to the aforementioned point, with javascript, any libraries you write can be used on both client and server. Great eh, write an AMF parser and it works on both client and server -wonderful.

Now, let's flip the example to a 'shopping basket', you see what we did there? now you've got an ecommerce application on the client side (think about that for a minute, you could put items from any 'website' in your basket, not one, any/all - oh and keep http stateless, and, and..) - here's another one, an authorization protocol like openid or webid - so a server could 'login' to a browser.. - how about an HTTP server in js, yes now it's on the client side and the server side - and when each side is both client and server isn't that just p2p?.

This universality breaks down the barriers of convention, it gets rid of that wall we have between server and client - can you imagine how many 'server side' technologies, libs, patterns and architectures nobody has ever even considered working with on the client side, can you imagine the implications and the period of innovation this will bring on?

Conversely, can you imagine how many client side technologies and libs nobody has thought about putting on a server? fancy using HTML as a data storage serialization and editing it via jquery on the server perhaps?

Maybe you can't imagine, maybe I can't - but fact is it will be possible, and people will start doing it, often just by lack of these assumptions and notions the current generation(s) of programmers have, they won't assume that something we've always used on the server side will be on the client, they'll just do it because it makes sense, and we, well we'll all be astounded.

Make sense?