One of the reasons I started this blog was to explore some more speculative ideas. Online Application Composition (OAC) is one of these ideas.
To some extent this idea this is inspired by Chris Anderson’s post on embedding Google Spreadsheet in a webpage. The real trigger, though, was Google’s release of the GData API for Google Base. That got me thinking about the quantity of data which is likely to be stored in Google Base.
Once that data is there, though, wouldn’t it be great if it was usable to “citizen programmers” - those people who build towering applications powered by sheets of Excel spreadsheets. Sure - there are problems with applications built this way, but wouldn’t it be nice to have the option to do something like that on the web?
Current “Mashup” applications built using APIS provided by Google, Amazon, Yahoo etc do provide some of this functionality, but I’d still argue that:
a) The programming skills needed to build a mashup are far beyond what is required to build a spreadsheet, and
b) Mashup don’t typically feature the deep data integration that gives Excel its value.
I’m not claiming that going from mashups to deeper, easier integration tools is a paradigm shift, but I do think that if a mashup is the typical Web 2.0 applications then perhaps the ability for non-programmers to compose online applications themselves could be dubbed Web 2.1.
There are a few applications already emerging in this space.
Dabble DB
Avi Bryant was kind enough to leave me a comment recently to make sure I knew about his tool in this space: DabbleDB.
If you haven’t seen the DabbleDB 7 minute demo video it’s worth seeing, if only to make you wonder why traditional applications aren’t as easy to use.
While DabbleDB enables “citizen programming” it has only just begun to add the features to enable deep API integration with other sites.
There is a screencast showing their work in this area. They do note, however, that:
There’s lots more work to do, of course. For example, these imports are one-time only, not recurring subscriptions as they should be. We need better standard ways of dealing with rich types like locations and date ranges. And although there are some good examples of structured data embedded in RSS, the majority of web apps still provide vanilla feeds.
DabbleDB is currently using Microsoft’s Simple List Extensions to transport extra data in RSS feeds. GData also provides some of the structure richer APIs requires,, and I expect that the DabbleDB team would be well aware of that option.
Dapper
Dapper is the newest of the tools I’m looking at today. I first became aware of it via a rave review on TechCrunch. Dapper is a tool which allows you to create an API for any website, and then combine it with other of these APIs (called “Dapps”) to build applications.
The Magg movie aggregator shows the kind of applications that can be built.
This is a very interesting tool: the ability to create APIs easily is a wonderful feature. It doesn’t yet have the ability to do “spreadsheet-like” features like adding columns of data, though.
However, it is still under heavy development as the latest Dapper blog post shows:
We’re happy to announce a new feature: Dapp linking. This feature lets you links two or more Dapps together. The output from the first Dapp is used as input to the second Dapp (and so on). For instance, if you have a Dapp which takes a zip code and returns movies playing in that area, and another Dapp which takes a movie title and returns reviews, you can link the two together. The end result is a new Dapp which, in this example, takes a zip code and returns a list of movies playing in the area and reviews of each movie.
JotSpot
JotSpot has always marketed itself as a Wiki, but it includes tools to do a whole lot more:
While other wikis only support plain old text, JotSpot allows you to create rich web-based spreadsheets, calendars, documents and photo galleries. It’s as easy as using a word processor — you don’t need to know HTML.
Joe Kraus (JotSpot’s founder) said (way back in March 2005):
JotSpot is a company that is building a platform to make it easy and affordable to build long-tail software applications. To take those Excel spreadsheets and turn them into real web-based applications where you don’t have versionitis, where updates find you instead of you looking for them and where you can integrate data in your hard drive with data from the web, email and other applications.
As far as I’m aware JotSpot doesn’t yet feature integration with other online APIs. As such it is a good “citizen programmer” tool, but can’t quite build the next generation of integrated applications.
