Developing Rails applications with Eclipse running on a laptop with 512 Mb RAM means that being economical with processing power and memory is crucial.

Just over two decades ago John Gage coined Sun Microsystem’s slogan “The network is the computer”. Only recently has this become a reality to some extent on a consumer level and thanks to various web services, saving RAM and CPU cycles by outsourcing them to the network has become possible.

The above screenshot shows four programs running in KDE’s system tray. Starting from the left they are: a calendar program (KOrganizer), an instant messaging client (Kopete), an RSS feed monitor (Akregator) and a gmail inbox monitor (KCheckGmail).

Until recently, I was running Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client instead of the GMail notifier. Thanks to Google and the authors of KCheckGmail, I can halve the memory allocated to email by shutting Thunderbird down and turning to KCheckGmail, which does nothing but check my email and send me to GMail.com when I want to read or reply.

The other applications mentioned are still running locally, not on the network.

Google is a pioneering force in providing open and reliable APIs for programmers to access their databases. An obvious motive for this is to have people stop using whatever office tools they currently use and outsource more to the network, i.e. Google.

A KCheckGmail equivalent for Google’s blogreader and calendar would provide the means to outsource even more of our office tools and it is only a matter of time until someone writes them.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 10:46 am and is filed under Open source, Technology, The Web as a platform, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.