Speaker: Duncan Cragg, Thoughtworks
Time: 12:30 – 13:30, Saturday 1 October

Native mobile apps are fast and slick. They are intimate with the mobile user interface, with the capabilities of the device and with the domain of mobile. On the other hand, the global mobile Web, especially in its purest form – declarative HTML and CSS documents, XML feeds – is mashable, linkable and sharable. It’s easy to create content that slots into the Web to be accessed on any device through simple links. Servers can easily scale through statelessness and cacheing. But, until NetMash, you couldn’t get the benefits of both at the same time.

NetMash is a Native app that is driven through a Web of interlinked JSON objects for mobile stuff: people, places, events, messages, news, photos, as well as simpler lists and forms. Such objects thus represent high-level semantic concepts in open standards, like vCards and iCalendars. These mobile objects are compact, dynamic and interactive, being updated both to and from your device. NetMash shows these Web objects and allows the user to interact with them, in Native look and feel, like a simple, mobile-dedicated browser.

NetMash can plot any object with a location on a shared map, or any object with a date on a shared calendar. For example, you have a person object representing you, and your current location. As you move, it changes, and, if you want, this object can be pushed to a server for others to see you, moving in real time on their maps. Just like on the Web, you and your friends can share the links to your person objects around, so you can all watch each other converge on a restaurant on your own maps.

Thus, you never need to pull or push data around in NetMash, as two-way dynamic data transfer is built in. NetMash creates “apps without boundaries” – there are no app silos or walled gardens and all apps can work or mash up together.

Duncan is a Web Architect working for the global Agile consultancy, ThoughtWorks, and previously at the Financial Times, various City banks and BT Research. His obsession with the declarative technology behind NetMash began even before taking an MSc in Functional and Logic Programming at Imperial back in the 80s. He has presented those ideas, in their current REST and JSON form, at the WWW 2007 conference and at numerous other conferences, talks and meetups around London and for ThoughtWorks. Duncan’s REST interest resulted in his helping out with the spec of AtomPub and currently in helping on the WS-REST Programme Committee and on the Microsoft advisory group for WCF Web API. The architecture behind NetMash – “Functional Observer REST” – is described in a chapter in the recent book “REST: From Research to Practice”. He is slowly implementing NetMash for Android on the train to work.