Pramati’s Dekoh and The Hypertext Computer

Pramati announced Dekoh this week. Dekoh is a platform that supports applications that run both on over the network and on the desktop. It embodies some of the ideas of an Hypertext Computer (HTC):

Dekoh Desktop is a small footprint download that can be installed on user™s desktop in a single click. Dekoh Desktop includes a web server on which applications written using open standards like JSP, Ajax, DHTML, Flash can be deployed and accessed thru a web browser. Applications deployed on Dekoh Desktop are automatically enabled for web 2.0 functions like tagging, sharing, commenting, rating, etc.

Dekoh Network allows controlled sharing of applications or content on the web. A user can share application/content on his or her desktop with a buddy, who can go to userID.dekoh.net and access it. The key thing to note is that the user is not required to upload different kind of content to different websites. Instead, the shared content and applications remain on the desktop and are served from there.

In particular, the presentation of the computing resources of the desktop to the world as a web server is an idea that is common to both Dekoh and HTC. The biggest difference between HTC and Dekoh is that Dekoh does not seem to address code mobility issues, instead, the choice by the programmer of using Dekoh does carry with it a choice about the locus of processing — it will be on your desktop.