Alex Iskold

Web 2.0 Journal Contributing Editor Alex Iskold (pictured) writes:  We are observing the transformation of the web from an ecosystem into an operating system. Building blocks such as websites, blogs, web services, podcasts and RSS are coming together and give rise to a new computing platform. The web operating system is emerging and it is bigger than the sum of its parts.  Remember your operating systems class, when you learned that every operating system has a handful of fundamental concepts such as storage, virtual memory and scheduling? The new web is no exception. However, since the Internet is a gigantic network of computers working in parallel, the basic operating system concepts take on a different shape.  For example, when you try to save a file on your computer, there is a (rare) possibility that the disk is full, and the write will fail. But with the new w... (more)

Web 2.0 Journal Feature: Google Plays API Catch-Up with Amazon

Just a few days ago I wrote an article about Amazon Web Services stack, in which I praised Amazon's vision and ability to deliver elegant, generic web services platform of the future. In the end of the article I mentioned that it will be difficult for Google and Microsoft to catch up. I could still be right, but tonight Google made it clear that they are going to be in this race.  The Google Base API is like Amazon S3 on steroids. In addition to pure storage capability, this API comes with concept of RSS-based structured data types, ability to automatically index and search the d... (more)

AJAX Patterns: Introducing JavaScriptBeans – Bringing JavaBeans to JavaScript

Six month ago, Alex Iskold (pictured) switched from J2EE Grid Computing to Web 2.0, JavaScript and Firefox extension development. He has been writing in Web 2.0 Journal about his experiences - see "From J2EE to JavaScript". Through this transition, I am continuing to have a feeling of deja vu. I write code thinking – 'Hey I've seen this before or I've done this before'. In software engineering deja vu is called 'design pattern.' If there is a good way to do something, we discover it, add it to the patterns catalog and apply it again and again. I remember being very impressed... (more)

Alex Iskold's "AJAX Patterns" Series: Concurrent Document Loader Pattern

Pattern: Concurrent Document Loader Problem: Need to load multiple documents and can't proceed until all of them are loaded Example: Load configuration files for an AJAX application Introduction AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript processing with XML. It is the asynchronous part that gets everyone excited. Fetching the data without reloading the page allows AJAX applications to mimic the desktop-like behavior. Since AJAX applications are getting quite complex these days, they tend use XML files to store the initial configuration settings and bootstrap information. When the appl... (more)

What Does the "Architecture of Attention" Look Like?

Alex Iskold (pictured), Contibuting Editor to SYS-CON Media's Web 2.0 Journal, writes: I had an interesting chat last night with Chris Saad of Touchstone about their platform and the attention market. The conversation was prompted by the announcement on TechCrunch that one of the leaders in the attention space, RootMarkets, received funding from Chicago Board of Trades. This conversation with Chris and post on TechCrunch got me thinking: we all agree that we are heading towards the attention economy, but what does the "architecture of attention" look like? To make the concept of ... (more)