WWC: World-Wide Composition

Today evdb went beta. It's very buggy right now. But there is already a lot of buzz behind it. It got me thinking again. Apparently it's just another calendar site with some small but significant improvements over things like when.com (anybody remembers that?):

• RSS: A simple way to publish and aggregate events and their updates.
• Tagging: A simple way for organization and taxonomy.
  
• A REST API: This is the most significant. That's why Jon Udell is talking about from open source to open service to open information.

We will soon see the advent of World-Wide Composition made possible by REST. In the previous post I talked about the 4 parts of a page, content, layout, style and behavior. Also remember the active URI scheme (basically a way to nest URIs) used in NetKernel. Any given page on the web can be built by composing from 4 different URLs for the 4 parts.

http://pageserver?content@http://...html+
laytout@http://....css+style@http://...css+behavior@http://...js

Call it service composition or what not, it's composition on the scale of the whole web. What does it have to do with evdb? I envision in the not so distant future, there will be one best of breed player in each application category just like evdb for calendaring. When anyone wants to build a new application, s/he just needs to compose it from combining the pieces from these various services: calendar from evdb, search from Google, shopping from Amazon, payment from PayPal, etc. This may even be possible with one (long) URL.

Now scale down the individual pieces. Is this another angle of the AppWiki concept? I think so.