Adventures in lightweight Internet app development

I should be clear up front: I am no programmer. I dabble in JavaScript, and I learned Fortran and Basic (not the visual kind) in 1978 and haven't used either since 1986. My programming style (such as it is) is declarative, not object-oriented. But I'm handy with Dreamweaver.

So when InfoWorld decided to create a lightweight front end for the Windows Sentinel performance-monitoring agents developed by our Enterprise Desktop blogger Randall C. Kennedy, I probably wasn't the safe choice to do the development work. But if you believe in the Web 2.0 promise that business analysts can do lightweight development, then I was the perfect test.

[ Monitor your Windows desktop and server performance with the new Windows Sentinel toolsfrom InfoWorld. Share your questions and experiences in the companion blog. ]

Well, the proof is in the pudding. You can see the results of my work (though vetted and tightened by our Web development team) at our beta Windows Sentinel page. The page is nothing special; it does what Web pages have done for years. But what is new is the creation of mobile and desktop widget components. Here's how they came to be.

Originally, Editor in Chief Eric Knorr's project mandate was to make Kennedy's performance monitors accessible through our site, so readers would have a personal landing page for viewing their data. That was easy enough: iframe the monitors generated by Kennedy's application on his server and add a simple JavaScript line to insert the individual's unique ID, so Kennedy's app would know whose data to stream. To get that ID, our registration server simply included it in the URL, so all I had to do was read it and pull the ID into a JavaScript variable, which would then pass it to the iframe.

Building for mobile Web 2.0

But I had recently bought an iPod Touch and was enamored with its ability to deliver much of the real Web in a handheld form factor. No less-than-Web technologies like WML there -- call it mobile Web 2.0.

Because Kennedy's monitors produced graphical charts from what the software agents recorded and because those monitors offered user configurability, it was clear right off the bat that we needed to focus on mobile devices that support "real" browsers, meaning those that could support the kind of HTML, JavaScript, PHP, and so on that you'd use on the desktop. The iPod Touch and iPhone showed me these devices now existed -- and that people were actually buying them.