Chrome Server : First impressions
Posted : Monday January 26th, 2009

Someone I know beta launched a new web-platform "thingy" today called Chrome Server. I've only looked at it for a little bit but here are my thought so far.

Okay, to start on a positive note it seems cool and the little I tried seems to work and for a beta both of those are good things.

On the other hand I'm not really sure what the point is. To begin with what exactly the service/platform/product is, well that's not entirely clear to me. Currently it seems to be a mix of (a) a product that lets you edit, manage a website through a browser, (b) a free (at least for now) hosting service, and (c) a new web application development language. I have a feeling the developers see points (a) and (c) together as a unique offering.

At any rate neither (a) nor (b) are anything new really. Web based editors of varying complexity have been around for some time now. So really what we're left with is (c). And how is the new development language? Well it appears to be JavaScript based, to one degree or another. I'll have to take a look more at it.

Well. I think I will have to play with this more before I can make a final judgement but as of now, again this looks cool and I can tell that a lot of time and effort went into it but truly, I'm not entirely sure of the point. The underlying premise seems to be "let's make developing simple web applications easier", but I'm not sure in the end how this does it. My experience tells me that most of the magical "let users build the applications they need without having to code" apps end up failing. And I think they fail because they are trying to fit a niche that doesn't really exist in my opinion. The reality is that the target users end up having to learn "a" language, even if it seems simple and really don't want to, and for more experienced developers the limitations of a home-grown API become frustrating rather quickly.

This niche between users and developers seems to be what Chrome Server is about, but I am not really too convinced that there are many people who fall into this category. I could be wrong. It's also possible that I am misunderstanding the point of this whole thing, I'll have to look into that as well.

Oh and my Chrome Server app can be found here.

http://chrome.maxstocker.com

It's not much to look at currently. I just set up my root page and a link to another page. As I have time to play with stuff it will probably improve.

Tags

Chrome  Server 

Categories

Technical  Internet 

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