Amazon Supports Static JavaScript Apps
If an app running in the browser, written in JavaScript, needs to talk to a web service like Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, etc -- you have to write a server app to act as a proxy, because it’s not possible for the JS code to directly call the service. This makes building an app more costly because it’s more complex, but even more important, it makes it necessary to scale the app. Every user costs more money, thus forcing you to either raise money from investors or sell access to the users to advertisers. This is the way the browser-based software world works today, mostly.
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I’ve been trying to talk with whoever I can at these companies to urge them to do the same as Dropbox did. If a few of them do, I reasoned, we’d get to critical mass sooner, and then some really interesting stuff would happen. All kinds of apps would be possible. Alas, none had done it -- until yesterday, when Amazon announced their AWS SDK for JavaScript in the Browser. Theoretically, it does for their web services, what Dropbox did for theirs. The claim is that you can call directly to their servers to do the kinds of things you used to need a proxy for.
