One of the latest buzz-words that I hear flitting across the office these days is “Cloud Computing.”  I won’t even bother to look up an actual definition (I stopped doing that after Web 2.0).  What cloud computing means to me is that a hosted application and all of its constituent data are stored on a server and taken responsibility for on behalf of customers.

Sounds like what we used to call ASP (Application Service Providers), but whatever, at least this new term doesn’t get confused with Application Server Pages.

In a way, the “Cloud” refers to a bunch of internet web applications working together, usually tied with Web Services enabling server-to-server or application-to-application communication.  Additionally, we tend to see “mash-ups” where certain applications can be consumed in somewhat non-standard ways, although this is becoming more commonly based on a set of “features” specifically designed to enable “mash-up” types of things.  I think REST APIs are a great example of this: as opposed to web services, which tend to be tied very much to a specific process, REST APIs tend to be more related to the piece of application functionality that they are trying to expose for maximum mashability.

Where does Agility fit in to all of this?

Well, Agility has been enabling cloud computing for quite some time: the system is an application and data syndication service that manages website content data across servers and hosting domains using web services. 

Is it any different now that we have the term “Cloud”?

I think it is.  The concept behind this term, especially as it relates to a hosted application like Agility, means much more than what I described above.

The Agility Content Manager application itself is really just a shell that contains Pages, Content and Documents – and these objects have a completely open schema, meaning you can store any kind of data in them.  We can (and quite regularly do) call web services to pull external data directly into the Agility system of content so that it can be integrated into a content workflow and, beyond that, we can enable the website that the data is pushed to, to itself pull content via REST or Web Service APIs and syndicate data via its own web services and REST, or even RSS APIs.

In other words, the Cloud concept helps us to understand that applications cannot be thought of as logical silos that stand on their own; rather we can now more easily conceive of a system of websites and applications that tie the web together in ways that we simply couldn’t wrap our heads around before.

More later,

- joel.