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Web components and distributed programming

Kottke has an interesting post on binding all of these Web tools together to make a platform of sorts.

[S]mall pieces loosely joined. Each specific service handles what it's good at. Gmail for mail, iCal for calendars, TypePad for short bits of text, etc. Web client, desktop client, it doesn't much matter...whatever the user is most comfortable with. Then you pipe all these together however you want...

This reminded me of a detailed essay at Daring Fireball examining the Dashboard/Konfabulator controversy. Konfabulator is a development environment for building neat-o little utilities on the Mac OS. It's based on a JavaScript runtime engine and can hook into the OS and the Internet. Apple introduced Dashboard, a JavaScript platform for creating the same type of widgets, with OS X. Accusations of Apple Microsofting the little guy ensued. Read the Daring Fireball essay to get full background and some very interesting details on the history of both tools.

I remember an old interview with Tim Berners-Lee [link?] where he said his original intention of the Web was to have pieces easily combined, pulled-apart, and re-combined. With the wealth of online utilities with open APIs and IDEs such as Dashboard or Konfabulator, we could be on our way there. Well, we're already there, so we could be on our way to a simpler "there." And I see that Berners-Lee has been heavily involved in the semantic Web too. Check out his co-authored article in the 2001 Scientific American.