Imagine we eventually have sufficient wireless bandwidth everywhere. What do we do with it?
I heard the idea that everyone’s palm-pilot/pocket-pc would be a web server. This is not unreasonable. Some current handheld PCs are running at 400MHz with 128 MB of RAM or more. I’ve seen PCs with less power run popular websites (with Apache/Linux). By the time the bandwidth catches up, the hardware will be a non-issue (hopefully battery-life will be a non-issue by then as well).
Why would Johnny-business want a web server in his pocket? Well, for some of us, it would store all of our personal and work files and host our own weblogs and websites. Perhaps we will all be hosting our own IM and email servers.
Add web-services into the mix and things get interesting. Need my contact information or access to my calendar? Query my personal info web service. The amount of detail my web services sends back will depend on my relationship to you. If I know you well enough, and I’m in a good mood, I might even let you query my physical location via GPS (with a limited accuracy — so you can’t detect… gyrations).
Why bother carrying this around with you? Couldn’t this work just as well if everyone had equivalent hosted services? Maybe — especially with a lighter client in our pocket that handles anything that needs to be in our pocket (GPS, voice-com, IM, etc.). Still — I wonder if, when battery life and wireless bandwidth are sufficient, will the concept of a “lighter client” become obsolete (because your cellphone/handheld can do it all anyhow).
What other applications can you imagine for a web-service enabled web-server in your pocket?
Comments
Alex - July 13, 2003 12:54 pm
How about an SQL server in your pocket! I would never leave my office.
Brendan - July 13, 2003 4:12 pm
Intel is apparently developing a wireless pocket server.
Richard Hyett - July 13, 2003 7:07 pm
Answering quiz questions.
I'm worried about the impact it will have on my pub quiz. Many of the questions you could answer in seconds given internet access. For example last week: What is the state captital of north dakota? With the advent of this kind of device everyone will be able to look up the answers. I think general knowledge will become much less prized and the quiz's will have to focus on local questions, local knowledge, riddles and cutting down response times.
nathan - July 13, 2003 9:55 pm
Contrary to popular belief a static webserver can be an incredibly simple piece of software. Much simpler than a browser and with very modest hardware requirements as long as traffic is low to moderate.
As you discovered above the client/server boundaries breakdown as services are offered by clients. What you are describing are peer-to-peer servives. I wouldn't worry about the exact technology though. Software is very flexible, don't let current protocols limit future ideas. Also the Internet has shown us that it really doesn't matter where the data is physically as long as it is accessible. And the cellphone/handheld <i>is</i> the "lighter client".
Sorry, I know I didn't even answer the actual question.
Peter Rukavina - July 13, 2003 10:35 pm
<P>The server that handles my email, and serves Reinvented, City Cinema, Brackley Drive-in and a variety of other clients is an old 200 MHz Pentium II with 160MB of RAM. It has performed this work admirably, and without fail, for almost five years now.
The server that ran the Island's first website, at the PEI Crafts Council, was an IBM PS/2 386 machine that ran at 25MHz.
Serving web pages, ever dynamic ones, is a relatively lightweight activity for a computer, especially when compared to running a graphical operating system like Windows. It's amazing to watch what happens to an "underpowered" PC when you install Linux on it -- it's like new life is breathed in.
~bc - July 14, 2003 12:14 pm
The limiting factor here is certainly the battery power (well, and ubiquitous WiFi, but I'm going on a battery tangent here...). A friend of mine works on fuel-cell research, and he told me that battery research has been seriously limited for a while (it was a discussion about batteries for electric cars). You could use an iPod-like battery which has good life put needs a charge every few days, but the iPod saves a ton of energy by simply loading the music in to RAM, so that the disk can spin down. A web server is a very random activity: unless you can load the whole site into RAM and you don't need to record any data, you're going to pretty much be spinning that drive non-stop.
Steven Garrity - July 14, 2003 12:23 pm
~bc, without getting on too much of a tangent about the specific technology (it's more the idea of personal web-services that I was thinking of), I think many websites can be loaded completely into entirely into RAM.
This entire site, including all content, images, and hilarious video is less than 100MB - easily small enough to be held in the RAM of a low-end MP3 player. In fact, I think current traditional web servers do just this for speed purposes.
nathan - July 14, 2003 12:46 pm
Serving static content from a mobile device is pretty boring. Don't worry about the hardware and the ram/disk size. Don't even worry about the software; doesn't even have to be web neccessarily. Do think about what information the mobile user has that might interesting to others.
Besides direct communication with the mobile user, the next most interesting things are their surroundings. These can be captured as location info, images, and sound. How about a mobile webcam?
Brad Pineau - July 15, 2003 10:21 am
It would be kind of cool if your pocket-server would carry all personal information, so you never need to stop to identify yourself, or even stop to pay for groceries. You just let their device connect to your personal server, and let it get the information it needs. It could even be done on the fly, so you don't even have to think about it.
David Grant - July 23, 2003 7:17 pm
I read your post last week and accidentally stumbled upon this site today: http://www.pocketsoap.com/ -- They have a Pocket HTTP, XML-RPC and Soap servers for pocketPC's... Looks interesting... thought I'd drop that off.