Jul 30, 2008 10:30 AM
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That's what SD Times is claiming, based on "internal Microsoft documents" that give more details on the skunk-works research project currently brewing in Redmond. The docs supposedly hint at a fleshed out platform for distributed concurrency—which entails moving what used to be core desktop OS functionality into the cloud for a partially or fully web-based platform. And while it almost certainly won't make Windows 7, Midori could be the first step toward severing ties with legacy Windows once and for all.
Says SD Times:
Midori’s design treats concurrency as a core principle, beyond what even the Microsoft Robotics Group is trying to accomplish, said Tandy Trower, general manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group.
The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.
In order to efficiently distribute applications across nodes, Midori will introduce a higher-level application model that abstracts the details of physical machines and processors. The model will be consistent for both the distributed and local concurrency layers, and it is internally known as Asynchronous Promise Architecture.
Sure, it's a possibility that this could just be a technology that will be integrated into a more conventional desktop-based Windows successor, or that Midori will stay in the Research wing like many Microsoft projects tend to do. But with so many industry players jumping into cloud computing (and with the Microsoft lifers involved in Midori "going back to their roots and writing code like they probably did in the old days," according to a previous rumor), the chances for something more ambitious are interesting to consider. [SD Times via The Register]
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