Looking forward to a Cloudy day

I've never met Jens Alfke but I've admired him and his work for years. Jens made a bit of a splash a few months back with his post Gone Indie in which he explained why he was leaving Apple. Looking at his chronology, I see that we first corresponded during his "year in the wilderness of doomed startups and soon-to-be-beleaguered coffee-themed server vendors." He quietly contacted me to explain the context for a series of articles I was writing probably a dozen years ago. With a few direct lines in an email he helped me see the bigger picture and dramatically improved my reporting.

Now that Jens has gone independent, he explains that he has "many ideas for applications, but most of them seem to rely on similar kinds of infrastructure, in particular a distributed, secure application-level messaging system." He explains what each of these means in his post Cloudy as Buzzwords.

What he's describing seems to be either a Jini-like or JXTA-like infrastructure that I talked about in Cocoa Spaces. Distributed and secure make sense to most people but many get stuck on "Application-level messaging".

One of the differences between Jini and JXTA is what is moving over the wire. With JXTA you agree on a protocol and send messages back and forth. With Jini you agree on a type system. Jens seems to be tipping in the JXTA direction, but his point is that the messages being sent back and forth are not meant for humans to read. These messages are intended to allow applications to easily communicate with each other.

I'm torn about Jens doing this work. I'm certainly not smart enough to do it, but I have talked to other people over the past couple of years about doing this sort of thing for Mac OS X. If you can build such an infrastructure then there is no end to the possible applications you can build on top of it. I'm glad Jens is doing the work, but I'd really love to see this as part o the Core operating system available on desktops, laptops, iPhones, iPod Touches, standard iPods, and Apple TV. I'd like to see Apple do this - but, it seems, they aren't.

And so I watch Jens post about issues of identity and networking and look forward to a really cloudy day.