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In a nutshell, what is zembly?

Zembly is a place where you can easily create web-based applications, together with thousands of other people, right from the browser. The idea is to significantly lower the barrier to creating RESTful Web services, widgets, and social applications. You don’t need to download an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), figure out what libraries to use, put it all together, install servers locally, deploy it, and then, when you finally have something working, find somewhere to put it out on the internet.

On zembly, everything is done entirely from a Web browser. It's a matter of a few clicks to put together an app that calls complex web APIs, works with Dapper or Yahoo! Pipes, and is available for millions of users to install immediately. It's trivial to create both REST services and widgets. It's also very easy to create OpenSocial or Facebook apps. Not to mention the fact that you're doing all this in a highly collaborative environment where you can easily draw on the work of your peers without having to recreate everything from scratch. Conceptually, it's very similar to Wikipedia, except for code.

Who is your target group?

The target is the people who need to create something quickly, right here, right now. For example, consider a situational app for a small team or a blog. Or perhaps you have an idea for the next viral Facebook app. With zembly, you can build all of this without having to worry about the technical and financial barriers of getting the app up and running. Plus, if your application gets popular, we’ll help you scale.

Speaking about scalability – aren't there too many useless Facebook apps already somewhere at the farthest end of the long tail?

Opening up the Facebook Platform has resulted in an incredibly broad assortment of niche applications, each delivering value in unique and interesting ways. While many of the long-tail apps may never end up reaching critical mass, individually they solve very specific problems that the original Facebook platform developers couldn't possibly have imagined, much less have the time to accommodate. Enabling these types of opportunities is an integral part of zembly.

Zembly is a collaborative tool - are developers already ready and willing to share the output of their work with everyone else?

In many ways, zembly is simply an extension of the same development model we've been using for years in the software developer community. Freely available source code has produced some of the most widely used software on the planet - the Mozilla Firefox browser, the Apache web server, the Glassfish application server, Prototype JS and script.aculo.us libraries, to name just a few. As new platforms start to emerge, many of the same principles that helped shape the early stages of the web will open similar opportunities for evolving the next-generation web.

However, we also understand that what's good for some, may not be good for all, so the choice of making your code public vs. private is ultimately up to the user, and we will respect that.

The Guardian recently reported that the NDA* in Apple's Software Developers' Kit (SDK) bar iPhone developers from working collaboratively. Could zembly zembly be running into similar problems?

Zembly currently only makes it easy to create iPhone web applications. We don't support creation of iPhone native applications using the iPhone SDK.

*) Non-Disclosure Agreement

Guardian: Apple's cult of secrecy begins to bug its developers

What could be possible applications for the Semantic Web Community and how could the Linked Data Community benefit from zembly?

This is a great question! While social element is very key to us (social platforms provide identity services, social graphs, and distribution channels), zembly is also about building situational apps, which are often based on various data sources. zembly is great in accessing web APIs - it's just a single JavaScript statement to access many of them.

When you combine aspects of common vocabulary and common access mechanisms of the semantic web on top of it, widgets and services suddenly become even more interoperable. So I think the Linked Data Community will benefit greatly. With zembly, it's incredibly easy to create and host applications that leverage the data web. And we would like to make it easy to build providers for the data web too. The basic pieces are already in. Now it's just a matter of putting them together.

About zembly

Zembly is a collaborative web platform where user can create and host social applications of all shapes and sizes, targeting the most popular social platforms on the web. Using just a web  browser, users can create and publish Facebook apps, Meebo apps, OpenSocial apps, iPhone apps, Google Gadgets, embeddable widgets, and other social applications. Zembly is sponsored by and hosted on the servers of Sun Microsystems. In beta stage, zembly is entirely free, and there are post-beta plans to ensure that there will always be ways to use zembly without ever being charged.

Our interviewees from zembly were Ryan Kennedy, Manager of Strategy & Business Development, and Jiri Kopsa, Social Platform Developer.

Free invites to zembly can be obtained on our blog:  scroll down and enter your email in the private beta invitation widget. The itself widget was created by Jana Herwig, SWC’s online media manager and admitted non-programmer, using just zembly and a web browser – another proof that no professional coding skills are required to create and host applications on zembly. Read her assessment on our blog.

References

Zembly
Zembly blog
Sun Microsystems