Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog

Mozilla as a Web services platform

Salon has an interesting article about Mozilla as platform for developing applications [via Slashdot].

It's so refreshing to see Mozilla being positioned as a platform, and not just as yet another browser. It will be interesting to see how much this platform will take off. It certainly makes sense to have Mozilla applications built around Web applications running on remote servers, since it would be easier to manage the remote content using a richer, desktop-like interface. Weblogs are a good example of such an application.

To be really successful, the Mozilla platform will need to penetrate the enterprise market. Mozilla could probably succeed better as a development platform for enterprise applications, than as yet another browser the IT departments have to support.

Having backend enterprise applications accessible as Web services would probably make Mozilla's job a lot easier, since there's no need to load proprietary code in the Mozilla application. Thus the only thing to be implemented in such an application will be only the user interface, which interacts with the backend Web services-enabled system.