What's up with the home cloud?

ABSTRACT: An abstract description of what I'm up to here.

I am generally frustrated with the state of software - and have been, for a long time. People love to reinvent the wheel all the time, make life miserable for the users that don't stick to base use cases etc.

I have some suggestions on how applications should be written and how the (software) world should look like. This is of course just one of the directions in which we could evolve but it's the one that seems to me to make the most sense.

There are quite a few components to this picture so you'll have to bear with me over the course of several separate blogs on related topics and, at the end, we'll put everything together.

There will be three different levels of this new "architecture", bottoms up:

1. The basic idea is that there are certain things that are necessary to include in ANY software component of any kind, for instance exposing an API to access and manage the internal objects, data and functionality.

2. A generic distributed application support framework will then use these to generate the "home cloud" - a cloud of interacting devices and objects under your personal, direct and total control.

3. From here, moving to the web, you can have clusters of clouds of different functionalities, completely removing the necessity for centralized software.

4. On top of these, there are different functionalities and specific use cases, such as "using identities", synchronizing files etc. I am not happy with the way these are handled by existing software, so you'll get a chance to hear my opinion.

It will take me a while to put each into words and sample code. I'm not just blogging here, I'm also putting together a framework to test all these concepts, hopefully good enough that it will be used by others. You can get a glimpse and keep tabs on that here http://razpub.googlecode.com

I will try to blog at least once a month, so a somewhat complete picture will form this year, but don't hold either your breath or me to it.

Intended audience: mixed. The blogs are individually searchable, so a personal review of the "Windows Live Sync" for instance will benefit anyone searching for that kind of stuff. I will try to categorize each blog, to benefit the followers.

I tend to be terse, so be ready to fire up your brain and read between the words. Non software-development professionals may have a hard time with my terseness and techie wor(d) games...they'll figure it out fast and stop reading.

I think that's all for now - I'll end this here and start working on the next month's blog.

Have fun!