SANTA CLARA, California -- A little application that lets you create a digital music library on your desktop from the CD covers on Amazon.com -- that would be cool. It's happening, it all depends on XML and, so far, it's legal.
They're called rich Internet applications and include a range of applications and services that run on the Internet. Extensible markup language, or XML, feeds supply the data that drive them.
Rich Internet applications, also called Web services, are a major focus this week at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara.
Companies like Microsoft, Macromedia, Apple Computer, Amazon.com and Google all gave presentations about grand plans to incorporate Internet-based services into upcoming offerings.
Macromedia, for example, announced it will launch an entire platform called Central this summer for building small Internet applications.
Central lets developers create desktop applications that will automate a wide range of Internet-related tasks. These Flash applications act like little worker drones, doing things like fetching news headlines at online news sites or tracking prices at e-commerce stores.
Demonstrated by Macromedia's chief software architect, Kevin Lynch, Central has some clever features. Lynch showed a price-tracking application that alerts users if something they're interested in suddenly goes on sale. No matter if the user is offline -- the software can cache the Web data in the background, and the applications continue to work even when disconnected.
Conference organizer Tim O'Reilly, president of O'Reilly and Associates, called the project "quite transformative."
A good example of a small Internet-enabled application that's available now is Sprote Research's Clutter.
An application for Mac OS X, Clutter automatically grabs images of CD covers from Amazon.com's website and displays them on a user's desktop. The application provides a quick and easy way to see the CDs in a digital music library. Double click on a CD image, and the music starts playing in the user's iTunes jukebox.
"I'd been wanting to write this app for a while, but couldn't find a way to automatically look up CD covers," said the programmer (who asked to be known as "SR"). "Then I found out about the XML interface to Amazon.com, which made it quite easy."
Amazon.com provides a lot of data about the goods it sells through XML feeds, including price, availability, reviews and images of CD and book covers.
XML feeds are being deployed more and more on the Web. All kinds of sites, from Wired News to Google, use the protocol to provide data about their sites and services.
Among big concerns like technical standards that are still in flux and security vulnerabilities, some people are just nervous about the changeable nature of nonproprietary resources shared over the Web. What happens to applications like Clutter if those feeds and others like them disappear or change?
Glenn Fleishman is a writer who runs a book-price comparison service, ISBN.nu, which relies on XML feeds detailing prices from a dozen online book stores, including Amazon.com.
Fleishman said he worries that his business would be in deep trouble if these XML feeds went away.
"I'm worried about Amazon turning it off," he said. "They have no commitment to keep it on. It's a very one-sided relationship."
Fleishman noted that the coming explosion of rich Internet applications may prompt sites to start charging for their XML feeds, or providing them only to select parties. At present, most XML feeds are experimental and freely available.
"(Amazon is) not promising me anything -- continuity, non-competitiveness or 100 percent uptime," Fleishman said. "Any application built on Web services has to realize it's not a two-way street."
Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos confirmed that the feeds are likely to change. However, the online retailing giant depends on people using the XML feeds -- in fact, the feeds were set up for people like Fleishman to use as part of Amazon.com's affiliate program. The company even pays people to use them by giving commissions on sales generated by the affiliates.
"The XML feeds may well change in the future, but they're likely to change so they are backwards compatible," said Bezos. "If they're popular, (the feeds) are going to be supported."
"It's an incentive for us to have them around," he said of the affiliates. "So I think they'll be around for a long time."
