Web applications? Think again.

Some time ago I proved that writing comet applications can be very easy.

Now I think, I can put almost anything online. I created chat, I have working proof of concept of ytalk-like web application. I'm thinking about putting Python interpreter online. These are rather standard web applications, someone did it before. What's the next step of "evolution" after comet?

Ideas are free, so I can speak about it, right?

The simplest way of getting new ideas for web startups is to select tool you're working with, and put it online (for example Gmail, Writely, Del.icio.us).

But wait, using comet I can do more than that. I can turn browser to a frontend to any application. Maybe create universal layer for visualization applications. They tried to create it: GWT, XUL. But we don't have to create new visualization layer, we can use existing one and put in on the web.

I believe it's possible to create X11 server online. You will run applications on the remote machine, connect them to X11 tcp port on the server, and view it with the browser. Imagine X11 desktop in your browser. Tabs could be virtual desktops, in one tab you could have multiple application windows. You could even stream bitmaps by emulating overlay mode using flash streaming.

That would be fun.

Advantages of creating web based X server:

• compatible with standard motif/kde/x11 applications
• you have desktop application? I can easily put it on the web
• that would be "the ultimate web application" :P
• if it works, this could be a new "standard" of writing web apps

Disadvantages:

• forget about Beryl/Aero (on the other hand we have OpenGL in flash)
• not so easy to implement, we need to create full implementation of X11 server
• could use quite a lot of resources (cpu+ram), what about scalability?
• cross browser compatibility is hard
• 99% of users on the web doesn't know what X11 is - not compatible with Windows
• latency is an issue, forget about "online gaming" this way

What's the next step of "evolution" after this?