YouOS

I just found a site called YouOS.com and I'm blown away. It's a platform for web application developement that's hosted online with an online IDE and online execution. All the apps in there run in Javascript with AJAX-like connections to some elaborate database server code. The tutorials on the site are pretty good at getting you up and running with "Hello World" and a few other simple YouOS apps. It only took me about 20 mins to follow the first two without any hard errors and it's definitely got my gears turning on something interesting to do on the platform.


So this is what the first operating system for the web looks like. I've got lots of questions. Is there a way to charge for an app if I create it and want to license it to users? Can I access anything outside the YouOS server? How hard would it be to duplicate this system? Their IM and chat apps are for the time being limited to those on the YouOS system. They're really going to need a lot of bandwidth and processing power if they're going to run this for a substantial number of users and allow meaningful access to other systems.

One of my big gripes with my two shared hosting accounts is that I can't run cron jobs on them without resorting to something like webcron so it's difficult to use them to build a web service. I wonder if YouOS will allow people to write server processes with scheduled execution. That'd really touch off the YouOS revolution.

I'm impressed with the speed of YouOS. They've clearly got some hardware resources at their disposal. They're clearly great at abstracting code so I think hardware and bandwidth are going to be their biggest challenges. A challenge which will be quickly solved when they're bought by Microsoft or Google. I, for one, am counting the weeks until that happens.

Links: YouOS.com