Earlier at PDC 2008, we unveiled Mesh-Enabled Web Applications among many other cool technologies that come under the banner of Windows Azure, Live Framework and Live Services. My breakout session on this topic was well received with hundreds of attendees who asked a bunch of excellent questions at the end of the session(link to the video and slide deck are in an earlier post on this blog). Some folks called the session "The most interesting announcement to me was that you will be able to write mesh enabled web applications that run “outside the browser” and can run in an offline mode" and we continue to receive positive feedback from a diverse group of folks, while listening carefully to all types of feedback.
In my session, I showed how to build an app once and run the same app on multiple platforms (inside a Web Browser and offline on Windows Platform). Why does this matter to anyone? This approach maximizes your application investment and minimizes your short and long term development and maintenance costs. Today, almost every well known website out there have a downloadable rich client to complement their web offering. Ebay has Ebay Desktop, Amazon has Unbox Video Player, I just wrote this blog post using Live Writer Beta which of course is a rich Windows client app used to write blog posts that are hosted on websites, there are many more examples of this model and they are growing fast.
You get the idea. Why do these websites have to do this? Generally speaking, these websites build rich clients to extend their web experiences into devices and desktop (What we call Cloud-to-Client) so that they can provide a much richer user experience than what can be delivered within the confines of a web browser. They want to harness the power of devices. This often requires additional investment in native code to create the rich clients for various target device types and platforms. Once you build a rich client to complement your website, your hard problems just begin. For example, one of the most difficult of those problems is Data Synchronization. The data that your user generates/updates on the client has to be synced with the website so it is avaiable when you want to access the data from a device that does not have the client. The other problem is sharing and identity management. Once your user has some interesting data, they want to share it with others. Live Services have many things to offer here.
In my session, I enlisted why I think websites do this and described how Live Services offer multiple solutions to address these challenges. In the proposed approach, rich web applications like Silverlight Apps can be synchronized and taken offline to run on the desktop, delivering a more native experience similar to rich client applications. Another very important thing to consider here is that, Live Services approach is not only about offline experience, it is about providing an Occasionally Connected experience where your app experience will not change based on the state of your connection to the Internet. These apps can easily plug into Live Services such as Synchronized Storage to where data storage on the client is always performed as a local operation agaisnt local database throuhg APIs provided by Local Live Operating Environment. This model lets you share code between the website and rich client versions of your app (basically they are the same app) as well as taking advantage of other Live Services that provide at-scale social, device and other mesh capabilities. The proposed model has some interesting value propositions that are appealing to a wide range of developers and applications ranging from Enterprise ISVs to Small/Medium Business ISVs to Web 2.0 social app developers.
You can start using Live Framework and experiment with these apps to see it for yourself. To get you started with the experience and application lifecycle, we have created 4 apps out of the box. Here is a screenshot of those apps (called Mesh Pack)……enjoy. BTW, I just won a challenge to build one of these apps from scratch using Visual Studio, and got the app deployed to run at-scale in our datacenter in under 5 minutes.
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