The web browser which is also a web server is a key feature of the Opera 10 beta. Some users may remember Opera as a for-pay web browser, but it has been fee and advertising free for sometime.
On my last visits to the Acid3 browser test-site, Opera 9 was my only Windows XP browser which quite smoothly ran the tests up to a score of 100.
I am now running the Opera 10 beta and have had a try at serving up my own web content. What I get is a window on my desktop with my custom widget in it. These had been called “Unite services” but are now called “Unite applications’.
Some of the available widgets at the Unite site do not serve to unite me with other users on the web, but are cute nonetheless. One was a simple widget that I open from my browser menu and lets me measure pixel distances on my screen. Widgets default to being “transparent” on the desktop, so you can devise all manner of cute non-rectangular tools.
But could it be a serious option for team collaboration in a browser-based environment? The issue will be security and security policies. At the moment I can open up any of my folders to be visible to the world. Unless that can be constrained in an enterprise environment, Unite would be a non-starter.
You start by having an opera account and adding a computer or site name. The resulting URL for your browser site might be:
http://laptop//juser//operaunite.com
In order to make my widget accessible, I added a directory. Had I chosen an existing directory, I would still be required to set the access levels for that directory.
The up-side is that everything is URL-based: a URL for each resource. And the only scripting done for that widget will be JavaScript. But there is the possibility of local I/O. Here Opera Unite has some similarity to selecting a directory in the security model of Curl. There is another similarity to Curl in that a Curl applet which uses a View as its root, also behaves as a new window on the desktop.
For a young developer just out of college but still unemployed, this looks terrific: don’t pay for web hosting, but demonstrate your JavaScript skills on-line. But how many job interviewers will be running Opera?
One group Unite might appeal to are amateur astronomers who possibly could share access to their remote-controlled telescopes by leaving their Opera 10 browser running with a suitable widget.
If this “let a few billion web servers bloom” appeals to you, the places to start are unite.opera.com and then http://dev.opera.com/articles/unite/
