CHRISTOPHJPETERChristoph Peter

More and more web 2.0 applications reach a level of sophistication usually only found in native desktop apps. One of the biggest topics right now is cloud computing and cloud storage. So I got my docs in google docs and I got my pictures in flickr and so on. Many apps by now already offer the possibility to import files from your local computer and some even are capable of taking stuff from other 2.0 web apps. The problem with this development is that each web app offers an API to make use of the data stored with the service. Now that would mean that every web app that wants to allow the user to user data from other web apps would have to implement all the APIs of each of those web apps. It is obvious that this will lead to chaos, poor connectivity and poor performance.

each line represents a API connection between a web service

A possible solution:

The next generation browser becomes a hub for all this data APIs. The APIs are implemented within the browser and the browser can then provide the data to web apps as if they were either stored locally or via a unified API. Lets take the simple example of pictures. I have a picasaweb account with google and a flickr account. boot use the same type of data – Image Data – but they are not compatible. both flickr und picasa offer the ability to upload local files. If the browser knows this as well he could then take the picture from my picasa account using the given API and then present it to the flickr account as if it was a local file. This is the most simple implementation of this idea.

The dream would be that all Web apps offer an API that fulfills predefined standards for different types of data. If I then have a webapp like google docs or this wordpress blog and I am asked to upload a picture I do not only get to browse my local pictures but also all the pictures from all of my webservices like google and flickr.

each webservice may use their own API for sending data but will receive data from the browser if it were local

advantages of this concept:

• so all the APIs only need to be implemented once in the browser and not by every webserice
• future APIs can be built directly to this framework which will increase connectivity even more
• the cloud becomes real as it really does not matter any more where the data is stored

I spent almost half a day trying to find a working plugin in order to embed my picasa galeries into my blog. I did not want another gallery management system or anything because I use Iphoto and via the iphoto/picasa plugin i can simply publish my galleries to picasaweb. I dont want to upload my pictures more than once so I was looking for a plugin that dynamically grabs the galleries from my picasa account and then displays them on my blog. There are many plugins out there that promise to do so. I used Ajax-Gallery but it stopped working when I updated to version 3.0 plus it is only in spanish. So I ran over the kpicasa plugin, which seemed the most promising to me. I tried to install it but it would not work since it requires php5. My webspace rendered .php files with php 4. I solved this problem by adding these lines to my .htaccess file.

AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php 

AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .php

That way all your php files will be rendered using php 5. Note: if your webspace does not support php5 this won’t solve the problem. After doing so I still got an error that looked like this:

Error: your PHP configuration does not allow kPicasa Gallery to connect to Picasa Web Albums. Please ask your administrator to enable allow_url_fopen or cURL.

This can mean either what it says, or the author told me it can also mean that your username is spelled the wrong way. Anyhow check if the features are enabled by using the phpinfo() command. If they are disabled talk to your webspace host. I found them to be enabled but it still did not work. The reason was that my webspace host blocked these features externally from the php.ini . I had them unlock the google domain and now it is working.  The Author(Authors Blog) was very helpful in this process and I got quick support. Thanks a lot for this great plugin.

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