Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Soft hardware ;)

Software products are getting complex everyday in terms of setting up, configuration, operation and maintenance. What if working on software gives us the feel of working like a well packaged hardware like iPod?

What is my definition of soft hardware?
1) Of the shelf usable.
2) Works with my laptop or desktop or server just upon connecting them.
3) No installation of software and no configuration for general use.

Examples
1) An integrated development environment with 1 or 2 test servers integrated with it (think of websphere integration developer - if you are aware). It is pain to install manage and work daily mainly due to the configuration. Now if that can be obtained in a USB stick and you just have to connect it with your computer and you are all set to go, you can do whatever you want. Not working! just remove the media and start afresh.
2) Pre configured webserver on a card

2 comments:

prodigy said...

Its pretty similar to cloud services in a way...I have been using Rackspace for a while now and it allows one to setup servers (apache)/databases (mysql/sqlserver) on the fly and on demand.

Chiradip Mandal said...

Oh yes. Cloud thing provides us some sort of this feel. But I am talking here a little different than that. Something like peripherals way. For example I plugin one micro device (can be a USB flash) and I get eclipse IDE running on my iPad (just an example).