Large-scale reuse and remix on the Web

Javascript Dataflow Architecture (JDA) is a project from Maya that attempts to solve the issues associated to large-scale reuse and remix on the Web through the use of black box composition. Quoting their Website:

Remember back in the mid 90s when we could tinker with the Web by just copying and pasting a bunch of HTML? You know how with Web Services and Javascript we can do a lot more cool stuff on the Web these days? Except, it’s no longer as simple as just copying and pasting HTML? Why can’t we do all these cool next-gen Web stuff while maintaining the tinkerer’s culture of the original Web? We believe this can be done.

They call these black boxes infotrons. An application can then be built connecting two or more infotrons together. These connections can be represented graphically through the use of what they call blueprints:

This blueprint will implement the display of a “Hello World” message 1 second after startup. Infotrons can be local components or even remote Web Services.

This approach to software development and component reuse looks really promising. If you’d like to know more you can read the entire paper (pdf) written by Seung Chan Lim and Peter Lucas.