A milestone year in the standardization of computing

The time for staring work on the production-quality P2P OS is getting nearer by the day, so i thought it's high-time to look around a bit and try to get a clear picture of what tools and technologies are out there for building true cross-platform applications nowadays, and much to my delight here's what i found:

1. we now have native threads built right into C++11, so there's no need for third-party libs (with God knows what kinds of portability problems each) any more
2. since the days of HTML4 already, one could build a full-featured GUI right onto a web page and have it rendered in any compliant browser (Wt is a pretty neat showcase for what can be done this way), except only for the multimedia features which were not included in the HTML4 standard; now the W3C is making really quick progress towards baking exactly these capabilities into the HTML5 standard (via the free VP8 format), plus device I/O and persistent storage (all of theses especially driven by WebRTC's needs), such that once work will have been completed on these issues a standard HTML5 web page will be able to deliver a full desktop-like experience right inside a web browser (including smooth 2D graphics editing and animation via SVG and high-quality 3D effects via WebGL)
3. last but not least, Qt is making steady progress towards becoming a usable C++ cross-platform development tool not only for all the major desktop OSes Win/Mac/Lin, but also for iOS, Android, and BB10
   

So at the end of the day, the world we live in looks a bit like this to me:

Back to the future: the good old tried and tested X client/server model anyone?

Now, while things look pretty neat the way they are already, how about going one step further? Namely, consider you decide to write your apps' UI based on a minimalist restriction of what HTML5 has to offer, e.g. you'll only use a limited set of widgets (say buttons, drop-down lists, and check-boxes), you'll use only an [editable] text area for all your text interactions, a canvas and an image renderer for graphics, and a simple file system API (well, this is prolly "too minimalistic" a set of UI functions, but i'm picking it up here just to get my message across); in this case, once your app is written based solely on (such) a subset of functions, what you'll have at the end of the day is a native app which will require a UI renderer with a very limited set of capabilities, such that not only you can use a standard HTML5 renderer on systems where it is available, but you can also build a minimalist UI renderer of your own (in native code) on systems that do not provide an HTML renderer: more specifically, where ever you'll find a POSIX(-like) system it's very likely you'll be able to get a port of WebKit (or even a full-fledged browser) for a pretty decent price (if not for free altogether), but if you are about to build an entirely new system of your own, then porting the Linux kernel (or writing a new fully POSIX-compliant kernel of your own) just in order to get WebKit running would be a titanic work that no ordinary small(ish) company can put up with all by itself.

And this is where the minimalist UI model comes into play: if you can have the GNU toolchain ported on your system (which should be pretty easy stuff, especially if you use an existing processor architecture - e.g. there's the OpenRISC out there for grabbing, and it comes with GNU toolchain support and all right out of the box), then all you'll have to do is to implement your small(ish) UI spec (e.g. in C++) and compile it with your gcc, and there you go, you'll have your apps truly cross-platform, ready to be deployed as-is both on any (minimalist) systems that implement your UI spec, and also on any systems that have an HTML5 browser:

The no-brainer solution: have your apps truly cross-platform-ready with a minimalist UI spec

Well, you tell me if i am wrong, but in my view (and given all of the above) this year may well become the most significant milestone in the evolution of standards-based programming after the standardization of ANSI C back in 1969.

PS
Apparently we'll still have to cope with writing BSD sockets wrappers for a while until/if they'll eventually be included in the C++ stdlib, but quite frankly that's a pretty trivial piece of code (given that we have standardized multi-threading baked inside C++) and not much more then a residual problem nowadays.

Major breakthrough, project back on tracks

After over a year of crunching the IPv4 CGN traversal problem at the back of my mind, it finally clicked! Or, more appropriately called, it banged!
In fact, this click (or bang, or whatever else i should call it) is such a major breakthrough, with such immense potential implications, that i have to refrain from saying much about it on this blog before filing a provisional patent; but what i can say though is that i'm 99% confident i found a novel algorithm that can break through all the IPv4 CGN types that are out there in the wild - and this is not just in theory, i actually tested it for over two weeks on all the mobile connections that i could find, on multiple networks, in eight countries around the world (with a few more tests pending at the time of writing). It did take me three weeks to refine the algorithm down to its current details (and it was quite a bumpy ride), but the bottom line is that i now have a working solution for full P2P/IPv4 connectivity, down to the most minute details, so that i no longer have to wait for God knows how many more months (or years?) to see how the IPv6 dust will eventually settle; that is, i can start working on the production-quality implementation of P2P OS right now.

So the next step: full-throttle fund raising campaign for developing the release-version of P2P OS (i.e. with youtube promo, kickstarter project, call-a-friend, and whatever else it will take to get them wheels turning). The stars aligned, the time has come, let the fun begin!

PS
About the patent thingie, that's just for playing safe, be cool :) - this project will be open source after all ("networking for the masses", remember?).