Soft Arts

John Gruber made some excellent points regarding today’s 2007 WWDC Keynote presentation. I would like to add a few more points regarding the business impact of Apple’s announcement.

Apple recently announced that iphone application development will be done as web 2.0/ajax applications instead of embedded, native applications.

For some classes of applications this makes sense, but the problem that I see comes with applications that use persistent storage. Although there are ways to provide persistent storage using javascript, these methods all use the web browser’s cache, which means that your users can inadvertently wipe their application data by clearing their browser cache.

Any developers wishing to work around this basically end up having to provide a server back end to persist user data.

The business impact of this is a shift from a software sales model to a service provider: instead of just writing, testing, and selling your applications you are now forced to provide a 24/7 network infrastructure for hosting your web service back end and user database, along with 99.999% availability.

Also, commercial applications based on service oriented architectures lend themselves best to a subscription model instead of regular license sales, which just means added headaches.

Obviously this is a non-issue for standalone widgets that pull down data from existing websites, such as imdb, but if you are an indie developer with an eye towards developing sophisticated handheld applications for the iphone this is a much bigger pill to swallow.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 8:10 pm and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.