Paralleling the release of ColdFusion 4.0 is a sea change in the overall adoption of the Web platform.  Increasingly, Web clients and Web application servers are central to the information infrastructure running the Internet, and an emerging wave of technology, driven by XML, is opening up the computing landscape to a class of problems that were never before easily solved by software.

In-line with this release, we are introducing a set of technologies that enable and solve critical problems in distributed Web applications using XML.  In this series of articles I will outline the vision behind this technology, and then provide rich technical details on the solution provided in ColdFusion 4.0.  This first article in the series outlines the emerging platform opportunity, and challenges faced in getting there.

Explosive adoption of the Web as a business computing platform continues at a furious pace. Every day, tens of thousands of companies and organizations are deploying more and more substantial portions of their core operations on the Web. Internally, every organization has seen the mushrooming growth of Web servers that act as content and publishing vehicles for information exchange and collaboration. Over a 100 million end-users, who average 14 hours of Web use a week, are reshaping the very fabric of how companies engage society and the economy.

The opportunity to recast society and the world-wide economy sits before us, and in fact, is unfolding now through the ongoing innovative adoption of the Web by cutting-edge companies and consumers. No one doubts the economic revolution underway on the Internet.

Fewer people, however, understand the implications of the infrastructure and platforms that are unfolding at an equally unparalleled pace. Organizations worldwide are rushing to deploy content and services on the Web. These mostly one-off applications are deployed on Intranets for worker collaboration, or business system automation, on Extranets and the Internet as frameworks to serve partners and customers. What companies don't realize in their efforts is that for every Web server they deploy, and every database or application connected to this Web, they are increasing the overall value of the global network.

Metcalf's law suggests that the value of a network is a direct function of the number of nodes connected to that network. An apt observation, though rarely considered in Web deployment considerations, this is at the center of the global opportunity created by the Web. For in every Web server and application deployed, every other node on the network now has the potential to interact with and leverage that data and service.

The value of the Internet is a direct function of the actually deployed data and applications on the network, and the leverage of that data to serve the networks of relationships that the Web enables. At a concrete level, this means that a company's public web site is now a portal into their critical customer service and inventory management systems; that their suppliers and customers can now leverage that information in a way that was never possible before global connectivity and ubiquitous, open platforms such as the Web.

And this is at the crux of the problem in how organizations are approaching the opportunity of the Web today. Most organizations view the Web and the servers they deploy from as stand-alone systems aimed at serving a fixed customer or employee base. The data they deploy is for the use and consumption of end-users, strictly. In this manner, they view their 'node' on the network as having fixed value for a given user base, as opposed to adding to the overall value of the network. Data and content and services on the Web are structured to serve fixed user-bases, not the rest of the network and other applications.

A good example is the FedEx web site. This site has been perceived and heralded as one of the first sites to embrace the Web as a commerce medium. At first a very simple application, the FedEx site showed that you could provide innovative customer service by providing customers real-time access to shipping information through a Web browser. No doubt, a huge improvement over first-generation publishing oriented sites, this approach still falls victim to the 'Web as a single node' problem identified above where the function of the Web site is to serve end-users alone, and in particular through a fixed and static application built into the Web site.

Embracing the Web suggested by Metcalf's law might have led (and still might lead!) FedEx to approach the problem in a different fashion. Let's take the example further to illustrate.

While clearly the FedEx customers include consumers and businesses receiving packages (and hence the need for a web-based customer service application), their true customers (i.e. those that are paying for FedEx service) are corporations that are sending packages through FedEx. In fact, the vast majority of their business is from corporations who pay for FedEx to pick-up and deliver packages. These customers, however, are not interested in an online service that allows their customers to track packages. While that approach is interesting and provides overall value, these companies could more fully benefit if their own order processing and fulfillment systems had a more direct way to interact with the FedEx systems, automating package pricing, pick-up requests, and billing.

This next-generation approach embraces Metcalf's law, and moves a Web site from being a strictly end-user application to being a back-end service that custom business applications residing anywhere on the network can leverage. And this clearly defines the increasing value of the network as nodes are added. Now, an online retailer providing an e-commerce service to customers can leverage the FedEx Web site as a distributed service that compliments and expands the capability of their own node on the network.

Cooperating nodes on the Web weave a fabric that expands economic value exponentially. Once this is realized, it becomes clear that the hundreds of thousands of web sites (Intranet/Internet/Extranet) deployed by companies worldwide are actually the fabric of a much broader new Internet economy, where companies create rich, distributed applications built on new value and service networks.

The Crisis of Web Applications

The Web infrastructure in place today was clearly not built to support the new models of information and commercial exchange that the new Internet economy requires. The vast majority of Web sites today remain hard-coded, static content sites, with no semblance of structured data or interfaces that could enable other nodes on the network to leverage that data's value.

Furthermore, this lack of structure in the data and applications on the Web today results in increasing complexity in the presentation of content in Web browsers. In some ways a paradox, while the capabilities of Web browsers have grown dramatically in the past two years, the approach taken to managing and deploying web content has not kept up with these capabilities. Updating site layout and interactive behavior has become a mammoth task for installed Web systems, as there is no logical separation of data or content from the actual presentation of that content to end-users.

Browsers have become true, interactive platforms, mutating into more of an operating system than a publishing medium. As nodes on the network, their ability to work with structured data continues to increase, much in the same way that Web servers have mutated into Web application servers. Yet, even as Web application servers emerge and play a stronger role, their ability to provide data and services to increasingly capable Web clients is hampered by the lack of a standard way to exchange structured data between Web application servers and Web clients.

While significant progress has been made by moving from static sites, to dynamic pages that drive JavaScript-enabled clients, this model still breaks down when corporations want to begin to expose their data and services more generically to other applications on the network. Browser applications cannot easily interact with arbitrary server applications, and server-based applications cannot easily leverage data and services running on other Web-server based systems.

All of this shapes the crisis of web applications we are facing today. Before us is a network of nodes with increasing sophistication and capabilities, yet we are unable to leverage that rich infrastructure because no framework exists to easily share data between these systems.

With this backdrop, it is clear that both the emerging opportunity and the emerging technology platforms are on the verge of something significant. Whatever solution is adopted, it must conform to the rich and heterogeneous nature of the Web. In the next article I will outline a view of the Web platform that can be applied to this emerging distributed computing landscape.

-Jeremy

Jeremy Allaire is co-founder and Vice President of Technology Strategy at Allaire Corp. Please direct comments on this column to talkback@allaire.com.