Jonas Follesø's World of Software - Microsoft unveils Live Mesh – Take your Silverlight application offline!

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Jonas Follesø's World of Software

Microsoft unveils Live Mesh – Take your Silverlight application offline!

Posted in: Web 2.0

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With Live Mesh Ray Ozzie and Microsoft is trying to tackle one of the growing challenges for end users to day: keeping their devices in sync and connected. Today Microsoft announced Live Mesh. One of the key things to keep in mind is that Live Mesh is much more than a sync tool, it’s a platform to build software+services applications, built on open web standards such as REST, ATOM, RSS, JSON and more. Currently Mesh is only available on Windows XP and Vista, but they’re working on a Mac client as well. Since this is all Web 2.0 goodness I guess it won’t take long before we see a Linux client as well.

Mesh is too big to cover with one blog post, and there are already lots of great posts out there. But I will highlight one of the details I find very interesting: Live Mash enables you to wrap existing web applications and take them offline. The “Mesh Operation Environment” contains a tiny HTTP server that enables offline functionality. Microsoft is taking an approach that is more similar to Mozilla Prism and Google Gears than to Adobe Air. I still find this really awesome, as this might be the final piece to deliver some truly awesome RIAs built in Silverilght, with offline support!

"…the web-to-desktop functionality of Mesh is essentially a wrapper for the actual web app. The same HTML and JavaScript, etc. runs in a desktop window in offline mode, data is stored locally, and synced later. The difference is that Microsoft is ting offline access into the Mesh service, so developers don't just get the technology to take their apps offline, but also access to the synchronization and cloud storage services to move their data back and forth… - Read Write Web"

Some of the more interesting posts on Live Mesh can be found at:

At least we now know what one of the main topics at PDC2008 in October will be! Oh, and I like the logo!

Update: Added some more links and pictures.
Update: The offline host is called "Web Companion", shown in the developer tour video

Posted at Wednesday, April 23, 2008 7:08:08 AM (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)
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Sunday, June 29, 2008 10:54:07 AM (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)

I'm guessing Live Mesh is meant for certain kind of online/offline applications. Can it be used for video sharing (HDQuality Full Length) a la Youtube.com way? Can it be used for Realtime Multimedia Broadcast applications like mermaid.metaaso.com? and can it be used for distributed search like www.faroo.com? Or perhaps filesharing like BitTorrent?

How much time does the Cloud require to replicate a change to a million users/computers?

I'm guessing the kind of applications I'm going to see on Live Mesh are Flickr, Twitter kind.

Is it going to be free? Till when should I expect to be able to get my hands dirty with it?

Peter Parker

Sunday, June 29, 2008 2:16:20 PM (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)

Hi Peter Parker,

Thanks for some interesting comments.

If you wan't HD video sharing/streaming I guess Silverlight Streaming Services is the way to go. It got a REST API, authenticates using Windows Live ID, and is part of the Live.com umbrella (dev.live.com). I'm sure we will see some Mesh<->Silverlight streaming integration.

Since everything (for now) is based around the HTTP protocol it would not be suitable to replace protocols like Bittorrent, but I guess you could perhaps use it to build distributed search. Have search indexes accessable by Mesh. The BizTalk Web Service Bus thing might be another framework to enable such functionality.

Replication change I don't know yet... I guess it's too early and there really isn't that many users on it yet.. Again, it's all built ontop of "the web" (http).

I expect to see collaboration applications, perhaps distributed source control systems (GIT on Mesh?), or the once you suggest.

As far as I know no pricing moddel have been mentioned. I think this is a "infrastrucutre piece", where you probably have to pay something if it gets huge (similar to Amazon Web Services or Google App Enginge)... Who knows..

As you Peter Parker, with great power comes great responsibility. Hopefully Microsoft will do it right when entering the cloud computing marked... By basing Mesh on open standards such as ATOM, XML, JSON and HTTP they're starting at the right place. PDC08 will show us more about what the Mesh could be in the future.

Cheers

Jonas Follesø

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