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© Copyright 2008, G.ho.st

Anton Bar — Open Web Operating System

Colorado Software Summit: October 19 – 24, 2008

Slide 1

Open Web OperatingSystem

Anton Bar

Chief Gheek

http://G.ho.st

[email protected]




Slide 2

About me

M.Sc. CS, the Hebrew University ofJerusalem

Researcher, Mosix.org – a Linux-basedgrid OS

Founder, WebAccelerator(acquired by ViaSat)

CTO, C.D.I. Systems

Chief Gheek, G.ho.st




Slide 3

About G.ho.st

Over 40 employees

Based in Israel and Palestine

Backed by VC firm Benchmark Capital

. .

.

.




Slide 11

Agenda

What is a Web Operating System:

What problem it solves

Web desktop vs. Web OS

OS vs. Web OS

How we did it

Problems and their solutions

Hardware & software stack

Standards & APIs




Slide 12

What’s in it for you?

New concept

Issues

Solutions

Set up a very large, scalable and costeffective data center in just 1 day!

Leverage 3rd party online services

OpenID / OAuth / WebDAV / OpenSAM

Mobile web – WURLF




Slide 13Slide 13Slide 13




Slide 16

Hard to believe, but….

"Computers in the future may weigh nomore than 1.5 tons."-- Popular Mechanics, 1949




Slide 17

Grr! USB is on the back!




Slide 18

Same concept since 70s

Walled in into one physical computer

Data stored locally

Software runs locally

Administration

• Installs

• Backups

• Firewalls and anti-viruses

• Save / restore preferences

• Upgrades

“Me and my computer…”

“Look – that stuff on the Internet is available from any computer…”

“Why can I do my computing on one PC only?…”

“Also why do I have to back up and administer this thing myself …”

“Maybe I can put my stuff on the Internet!…”

“Here goes – first I will use web mail…”

“I will upload my photos to Flickr…”

“Movies…”

“Upload some bookmarks…”

“Google spreadsheets…”

“Hmmm, now I have 25 different passwords, 13 different folder systems,inconsistent look & feel and little interoperability…”

“And I still have some stuff which ties me to my own PC…”




Slide 31

What’s in a name?

Mashup (iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes)

Vendor specific (try Gigya.com)

No interoperability

Web desktop (YouOS, EyeOS, GlideOS)

One ecosystem – data, settings and apps

It’s gone – you’re toast!

Web Operating System (G.ho.st)

Any data source / Any application




Slide 32

Web Operating System

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system

An operating systemis the softwarecomponent of acomputer system that isresponsible for themanagement andcoordination of activitiesand the sharing of theresources of thecomputer.

A web operating systemis the softwarecomponent of a distributedcomputer system that isresponsible for themanagement andcoordination of activitiesand the sharing of thedistributed resources ofthe users.

1970 2008




Slide 33

Drivers

1970 2008

Hardware

Device Drivers

System API

Applications

OS

Resources

Resource Drivers

System API

Applications

WebOS

Demo – G.ho.st




Slide 35

So what’s the problem?

Three main issues

Interoperability

Weak & different clients

• Browsers

• Mobile browsers

Load on the servers

• Many users

• Lots of data

• Slashdot effect




Slide 36

Issue #1 - Interoperability

We use more online services, but:

Common data schemes? Not at all.

Standards? Of course, many of them

Open APIs? Some.

Single sign on? Some.

Unified security protocols? Only a few.

Built for interoperability? Not many.




Slide 37

Go2Web20: ~4000 services

http://go2web20.net




Slide 38

Interoperability – Agenda

SSO

Identification / authentication

Authorization / permissions

Data

Read / write / share / search

User interface

Embed / Call

User preferences (look & feel, localization)




Slide 39

SSO – OpenID

http://openid.net/

Reuse existing user credentials fromLiveJournal, Yahoo!, AOL, Blogger, …

Low usability

Users rarely pay attention to URL – invitesvarious exploits in multi-stage auth

The distinctions between identity,authentication, and security got blurred –OpenID does only the identity part




Slide 40

OAuth – a valet key

http://oauth.net

Community-driven open standard forsharing of resources between services

Authorize apps to access user’s datawithout providing username or password

Use case: print selected pictures fromSmugMug on SnapFish

Will be discussed in details in my next talkthe “Open Web File System”.




Slide 41

OAuth “Dance”

User Provider

Consumer

Use data

1

Get tokens

2

Authenticatetokens

3

4

Get/Put data




Slide 42

SSO – G.ho.st

Until there’s anything better, we keepuser’s credentials for any 3rd partyservice

Demo




Slide 43

Interoperability

SSO



Data


User interface

Embed / Call





Slide 44

WebDAV vs. AtomPub

http://www.webdav.org/

RESTful remote file system

Any storage can be mounted as a drive

OpenOffice and MS Office support WebDAV

Use case: mount my Google Docs

Discussed in details on my next talk –the “Open Web File System”




Slide 45

G.ho.st Object Sharing

GHOSH – a lightweight metadata layerdescribing different web resources

Metadata

Video on YouTube (rating, length)

Product on Amazon (rating, price)

Document on Google Docs (caption, size)

Tagging

Unified tagging system for all resources




Slide 46

Interoperability

SSO

Identification


Data


User interface

Embed / Call





Slide 47

GUI – OpenSAM

http://www.opensam.org/

Set of techniques to integrate web apps

Home application – launch other apps

Productivity application – launched byother apps

The two apps talk through endpointsdefined in Application Description File




Slide 48

OpenSAM – Architecture




Slide 49

OpenSAM App Def File

http://yourapp.com/opensamadf.rdf




Slide 50

OpenSAM – Architecture 2




Slide 51

Open APIs

Set of APIs – REST, XML-RPC, SOAP

CRUD resources

Get localized strings for a language

Support different RIA technologies:

AJAX, GWT

Flash, OpenLaszlo, Adobe Flex, Air

“Really, It’s Adobe”




Slide 52

REST APIs

http://g.ho.st/rest/users/username/...

Authentication

Get session ID / session cookie

Access resources

Get desktop persistence file

Get files / RSS / webmarks / stickies




Slide 53

Interoperability Summary

SSO



Data


User interface

Embed / Call





Slide 54

Issue #2 – Weak clients




Slide 55





Slide 56





Slide 57

Our choice: Server/Client Split

Citrix/terminal server;Old mainframes:

State on the serverProcessing on the server

Installed software:

State on the clientProcessing on the client

Economics of hosting

Availabilityand security

of data

G.ho.st:State on the server

Processing on the client

G.ho.st breaks the link between

persistence and processing forthe OS as other Web 2.0 appshave done for apps




Slide 58

JavaScript Benchmarks

http://kourge.net/node/122




Slide 59

Open Laszlo

AJAX is still slow, especially on IE

Flash is proprietary

Open Laszlo

Open source

Declarative / imperative programming

Render as DHTML or Flash

G.ho.st is sponsoring Flash9 support




Slide 60

Other Alternatives

Adobe Flex

Features / excellent widget toolkit

Client performance (Flash9)

Google Web Toolkit

Client performance

Server side integration (Java)

Tersus: http://www.tersus.com/

100% visual – no coding, no scripting




Slide 63

XHTML MP vs. CHTML




Slide 64

Mobile client

Plain JSP

Output XHTML MP (a subset of)

No Java Script

No fancy CSS styles

Use WURFL to detect devicecapabilities

Demo – G.ho.st Mobile




Slide 66

WURFL

http://wurfl.sourceforge.net

Java library and an XML file

Init the library (load the XML) once(singleton)

Call to test some specific capability

Use it? Contribute patches back!

WURFL – Example




Slide 68

Reminder

Three main issues

Interoperability

Weak & different clients

Load on the servers




Slide 69

Issue #3 – Many Users




Slide 70

System Requirements

Sufficient computing power

High data volumes

Bandwidth

Slashdot effect

Scale up and down dynamically

Load balancing




Slide 71

G.ho.st Data Center

• G.ho.st has virtualized its dataoperations on top of Amazon Web Services(AWS)

Low cost, pay as you go model

Complete flexibility to scale up/down

Can focus on G.ho.st’s core, userexperience, R&D and marketing

Price of a stress test on 10 servers?




Slide 72

Your own server on AWS

http://www.amazon.com/aws

S3 – Simple Storage Service

• Read / Write objects of 1B to 5GB

EC2 – Elastic Compute Cloud:

• Create / Use preconfigured machine image

• Upload it to S3

• Start / use / stop virtual machines (scaling upand down) as much as you want

SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service…




Slide 73

How we did it

Set up your data center

Create your machine image or use public

Upload your image to Amazon S3

Buy a domain

Register on DnsMadeEasy.com

Create a new A record (use any IP)

RightScale.com – link the A record toEC2 instances




Slide 74

How we did it 2

Manage your data center

RightScale.com: http://wiki.rightscale.com

Elasticfox plugin for Firefox

Both let you create, shut down, reboot,delete your servers

RightScale also provides:

Monitoring

Automatic scaling up and down!




Slide 75

Architecture Summary

G.ho.st Architecture

Open source stack used exclusively:

• Server: Java on Linux

• Web client: OpenLaszlo

• Standards today: OpenSAM, WebDAV

• Standards soon: OpenID, OAuth

• Open APIs: REST, XML-RPC




Slide 76

Open Source

G.ho.st Mobile is FOSS:http://code.google.com/p/pixie-os/

Alpha: http://g.ho.st/m

GhWT – client toolkit, extendsOpenLaszlo basic libraries:

Localization

Widget library




Slide 77

Advantages

Access from anywhere

Organize your online stuff

No administration

Security (vs. installed apps)

Free

And last but not least…




Slide 79

Go Virtual!

Thank you!

Next talk:Open Web File SystemA virtual cross-service file system

Try: http://G.ho.stVIP promotion code: Anton’s-friend

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