Web Apps -- requirements for installation and management

a thread mentioned in the face-face today:


As the Web Apps is becoming a seriously valuable cross-platform computing platform,
we need to standardize as quickly as possible a large amount of functionality
which developers 

I'd personally like this platform to nail functionality which allows me to:

- Express trust in a source of of software
- Install software from a trusted source or sources, recursively loading dependencies (like debian packaging etc)
- Have on my machine > 1 version of the same library if needed by different apps
- Be able to allocate to an app:

	-- Program storage
	-- Data storage

	-- Runtime memory * 
	-- CPU cycles in the background *
	-- Network bandwidth *
 		* maybe unlimited by default but tracked

	-- Access to data common to several apps 
	-- Access to Private data
	-- Devices, location, camera, microphone, etc

- Be able to see which apps are responsible for using
  how much of the above resources, or specifically dominating 
  the use of them.  (Eg GrandPerspective on Mac, but same for network bandwidth
 through my machine or my house)
 Good user interfaces for these things will be necessary
 to cope with apps (or libraries) using too much resource accidentally
or maliciously.

- Be able to group apps and associate them with tasks or types of activity
 so that I can see which things which I like to do will suffer if I reclaim

- Be able to upgrade apps automatically or manually

Note the above "apps" and "libraries" should be taken very broadly
and include media, whether used in an app or a web page or
just a downloaded movie.

Also it could include things like persistent caches of DTDs Ontologies
and registry entries such as Internet Content Type registries.

It should include the ability to download a part of a web site like a magazine
(as you can in HTML5).

Tim

Received on Tuesday, 8 February 2011 18:24:36 UTC