Missing Zimki Already

or, why I won't be migrating to Google Mashup Editor

Last winter I wrote a small web application called groupr which let you look at photos from your Flickr groups in one place. I did that partly because I thought it would be useful (it is, a bit) but also because I wanted to play with the platform the company I'd once worked for had released. That platform was called Zimki, and it was, in hindsight, a pretty ambitious thing for a small company to attempt.

Zimki is a hosted server-side Javascript application framework, complete with a data storage model and a templating engine (actually two). It makes it easy to quickly knock up a small web application, or at least it does once you wrap your head around it and get hold of tools to save you using the (frankly awful) web pages provided for editing your app. It's the closest I've seen to what Marc Andreessen has called level 3 platforms:

A Level 3 platform's apps run inside the platform itself -- the platform provides the "runtime environment" within which the app's code runs.

Indeed, this is exactly how Zimki works. Unfortunately, it's also closing by Christmas.

There's a big company out there who also have something that looks a bit like a level 3 platform. Google Mashup Editor also lets you run code in a hosted environment, build multi-page sites, and read and store data from the web. Unfortunately, there's no way I can port groupr to it.

Firstly, there's a very limited set of server-side computations allowed. If there's not a module or control for something, you can't do it. This is the first thing I ran across. groupr has a local config file with my Flickr API key and secret, and it uses MD5 to calculate the required parameter for the authentication step. It turns out that's impossible with GME.

Secondly, there seems to be no way to pass data in to the application other than by user interaction or feeds. Notably, you can't inspect HTTP query strings, the mainstay of web programming since 1994. Since Flickr's frob is returned in an HTTP parameter, this means it's impossible to ever use GME for a Flickr application that requires authentication. Well, actually, you could do everything on the client side, but then why use a hosted environment at all? I doubt I'd get enough use out of its templating language to justify the effort.

As with my complaints about Skitch, this is almost certainly a case of me wanting a product to be what it's not, but I can't help feeling that if Google aren't prepared to build a real Level 3 platform, nobody is. In the meantime, I suppose revert to writing my own apps with web frameworks that use SQL and which need work to scale, just like everyone else does.