User:JohnPritchard/Web operating system 6

The term Web operating system or WebOS has been used to describe a network application system for integrating web applications into a web based work space. These systems may be better described using the terms web desktop or webtop.

The term web operating system has been used in the academic literature of Computer science in the field of metacomputing to describe network services for internet scale distributed computing, as in the WebOS Project at UC Berkeley, and the WOS Project. In both cases the scale of the web operating system extends across the internet, like the web.

More broadly and with far greater popularity, the terms WebOS and web operating system have been employed in many ways in the context of "the web as in HTTP". In April of 2002, Tim O'Reilly spoke of "the emergent Internet operating system" as an open collection of Web services.

Common to all uses, a Web operating system is distinct from Internet Operating Systems in that it is independent of the Operating system as the software abstraction layer over computer hardware.

WebOS Project
The WebOS Project is a computing research project started at the University of California, Berkeley to develop suitable software development abstractions for applications that run over a network. The abstractions it provides include: Research on WebOS has continued at Duke University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Washington.
 * a filesystem that identifies data by uniform resource locators
 * a location-independent resource naming system
 * secure remote execution
 * secure data access
 * fail-safe transactions

The conception of the web operating system in the WebOS project can be characterized as a finite or catalogued collection of services.

History
WebOS gained popularity in 1999 when a much touted start up, WebOS Inc. (at first known as MyWebOS ), was founded by Berkeley grad Shervin Pishevar and Emory grad Drew Morris. WebOS licensed the WebOS technologies from Duke University and University of Texas (Austin) and recruited Dr. Amin Vahdat, Professor of Computer Science at Duke, who had pioneered the WebOS technologies at University of California at Berkeley where he got his PhD on his WebOS research. WebOS acquired WebOS.org, which was created by a young Swedish programmer, Fredrik Malmer, who had created the first online desktop environment. Soon after, some of the top DHTML and Javascript programmers in the world such as Erik Arvidsson of WebFx fame, Dan Steinman, creator of the Dynamic Duo Cross-browser DHTML API, joined WebOS. WebOS raised over $10 million in financing from Impact Venture Partners led by Adam Dell and Grotech Capital. WebOS was launched with a vision of created the first web operating system complete with a WebOS API allowing developers to create Windows-like web applications that worked an extremely fast speeds by caching much of the code in the local browser. Arvidsson later launched Bindows, a framework very similar to the WebOS API, that does much of this and is used by many large companies and the US Military. WeBOS filed the first very WebOS patents in 1999. WebOS competed with another start up, Desktop.com, which was aimed more at the consumer market. WebOS was covered by many media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, financial Times, LA Times, Power lunch on CNBC, Fox News and CNN and helped spread the WebOS meme further. WebOS launched Hyperoffice, a full office suite, back in 1999.

WOS Project
In the context of the WOS Project, the web operating system is conceived of as a dynamic or ever changing collection of services.

"The WOS (Web Operating System) is a joint project of four universities that aims at developing an operating system for the Web on top of existing operating systems and making the native services internet wide available."

- Simon Schubiger and Béat Hirsbrunner

Webtop
The term web desktop or Webtop describes a virtual desktop on the web, running in a web browser. A webtop delivers an environment for using compatible web based applications.

Some characterize webtops as instances of a web operating system, while others may believe that webtops have far too little in common with the current state of the art in the evolution of the operating system to merit this usage. The webtop has evolved into a thin layer of the web infrastructure for composing an application or work space, as opposed to the distributed evolution of operating systems such as the evolution expressed in the generations from Unix through Plan9 and into Inferno.

The webtop is a center of activity for the Office 2.0 online workspace.

Evolution
Web 1.0 webtops are systems that present web applications running on the webtop server. The implementation of each application is entirely or largely specific to the webtop system.

Web 2.0 webtops are systems with minimal compatible application code (for example in XML with embedded HTML and JavaScript) running from the webtop server. This approach permits the webtop application to be a slim web graphical user interface to any other web 2.0 application.

Technologies
The Web 2.0 evolution separates the Graphical User Interface from the application service using an XML based interaction interface rather than serving the Graphical User Interface directly as in Web 1.0 applications. In this model there are many possible client side (browser) technologies for implementing the Graphical User Interface, likewise any one application can have many different Graphical User Interfaces originating from many different sources.


 * HTML and JavaScript are the most common.


 * Adobe / Macromedia Flash is very nice, and often called Rich Interactive Application (RIA).


 * Java Applet can of course perform this role.


 * Any desktop application can also work with a web service.

Examples
Examples of webtops include the following.


 * webOS
 * eyeOS
 * youOS
 * cmyOS
 * XINDESK
 * Purefect Desktop
 * Desktoptwo
 * Protopage
 * Google Personalized Homepage
 * Pageflakes
 * Netvibes Personalized Homepage
 * Goowy

Existent webOS communities

 * EyeOS (Open Source, under General Public License) - Public Server eyeOS.info, Main Website
 * Webbed Space - A WebOS & Web space
 * Purefect Desktop - Online Demo (Open Source, Provide Web-Based AJAX IDE and Instant Messenger)
 * Fenestela Weblog - French WebOS (member of Team Orca)
 * Orca (orca@desktop) - United WebOS - (member of Team Orca)
 * YouOS (Server code proprietary / Client side javascript available under BSD license)
 * WebOS - a standard website platform: Empowered Internet Solutions (Distributor)
 * WinLIKE (Proprietary) - a full working window environment, eg. for WebOS's: http://www.winlike.net/
 * XINDESK (virtual desktop, run by XIN teleport)
 * Desktop two
 * Challenger (Creative Common Licence) (IE Only)
 * SameDesk A Common Workspace for Web Applications (open source: GPL server, MIT client)

Beta/alpha/planning webOS

 * AtomicOS (Open Source, LGPL)
 * Twinkle Fish - a kinder, gentler OS: (parody site)
 * Psych Desktop - From the owners of Psych Designs, a desktop that focuses on attractiveness, and usability