Rationale

Ampify is an open source competitor to the various proprietary platforms that currently threaten to fragment the Open Web [Neuberg-2008]. It addresses the fact that technological complexity is fast becoming unmanageable:

Platforms ✕ APIs ✕ Devices ＝ Brittle.Complexity

Innovation slows down as developers try to assess, learn, code, test and deploy for the various platforms — again and again and again. Our collective efforts are wasted on working around technical incompatabilities and shortcomings.

We desperately need a period of convergence at a much higher level than what we currently get from web browsers. Incompatibility on issues like identity, structured data, media delivery and interfaces keep giving opportunities for closed platforms to gain adoption.

The fact is, the Web is over 20 years old [Berners-Lee-1989] and was never developed with today's applications in mind. As a result countless developers have had to independently solve the same problems over and over, e.g. messaging, scalability, security, &c.

“Ease developer pain and take innovation to the next curve”

We need solutions that will take innovation to the next curve [Kawasaki-2006]. Ampify is one such solution. It builds on top of the Open Web principles and will hopefully be a worthy successor to the Web someday.

The design and development of Ampify is driven by a few key principles:

  • Decentralisation and openness.
  • Ease of use.
  • Speed, security and scalability.
  • Simplicity beyond complexity.

Wherever appropriate, Ampify makes use of existing open source technologies as much as possible, e.g. Caja, Chromium, CoffeeScript, Dirac, FFmpeg, FreeSWITCH, Git, Go, jQuery, Keyspace, Mapnik, Native Client, Node.js, PyPy, Python, QuantLib, Redis, Ruby, Sizzle, Theora, V8, WebM, &c.

Ampify is without doubt a very ambitious undertaking. And, despite having had over 10 years of research, it is going to be quite a challenge to pull off. But if you'd like to help make it a reality, do join us on the #esp channel on irc.freenode.net. All are welcome!