Should Amazon have supported more advanced (and more conventional) storage and messaging APIs out the box? Perhaps. But when you plant a new field of grass there's an old adage: Watch where the footpaths go before you lay down the sidewalks. Amazon's S3/SQS duo is a green field that invites entrepreneurs to think way outside the box. For example, these technologies aren't obviously the foundation of an AJAX-oriented service grid. But if that's where people want to go, Amazon seems willing to help them get there. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
Bill Seitz alerted me to one of those footpaths the other day: Les Orchard's S3-backed wiki. Outstandingly cool! For those who have not followed the various plot threads closely, this is an evolution of the idea of the serverless wiki. TiddlyWiki, which I've mentioned a couple of times, is a member of that species. It's a single HTML "page" that implements wiki behavior in client-side JavaScript; you save your page to your local disk to record changes permanently.
Les has substituted Amazon's S3 network storage for the local disk. It's a wonderful hack that anticipates a whole new breed of highly-available serverless applications. When I first wrote about the concept of a SPADE (Single Page Application Development Environment) it seemed interesting but far-fetched. Backed by S3, though, it starts to look a whole lot more practical.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/07/20.html#a1490