This video shows our platform in action as I recreate a chat application example from our first Beta Workshop. The entire cloud IDE is built with Valaa and streamed to the client application from the cloud. The chat has it’s own event list that is then extended when participants add new messages to the chat.

The SaaS is dead, long live the SaaS!

API economy is killing the “service” from Software as a Service. Software as a Stream can take care of the rest.

The shift towards API (Application Programming Interface) economy is promoting smaller client applications that simply tie in and communicate with different APIs, usually from multiple providers.

The value is no longer in the static code of the application that is running on your desktop, mobile device or web browser. It is in the quality, intelligence and relevance of the APIs. When customer relationships start forming directly between the end-users and the API providers, the monolithic “service” that the Software as a Service businesses provide is no longer what the customers are looking for.

Final obstacle in the total shift from Software as a Service economy to all-out API economy are the client applications. For every end-user need there has to be a piece of “traditional software” that does those API calls, displays the results and provides the means to interact. Until now, that is.

Introducing SaaS (Software as a Stream)

In general, every application is created through a series of tasks. You create and modify files, classes and objects. You declare variables, assign values and call functions. You test, debug and deploy. A piece of software can be seen as an ordered list of all the events that the developer did when building it. And the tasks performed by the end-user are no different.

When a single client application that is capable of understanding and applying these events one after another on top of the existing state, it is capable of recreating an application in the client-side without ever been designed for that specific application. If the events caused by the end-user are added to the event list and broadcast to others, we have a multi-user application. If you have your personal list(s), you have a user-specific application state. If events can create pointers to other lists and load them when needed, we have a distributed platform that is capable of streaming software.

This is the approach we took at Valaa when designing the infrastructure of our collaborative programming environment. So far we have successfully built:

1. An API specification (and the first implementation) for a set of events that are needed to holistically model the creation and usage processes of an arbitrary web application within the Valaa ecosystem.
2. The first implementation of a cloud infrastructure capable of storing, receiving, validating and broadcasting these events.
3. A single client application that is capable of communicating with any number of these APIs, reconstructing and updating an application by “playing back” the received events and sharing data by sending new events back to the API to be broadcast to others.

We launched our Closed Beta on 20th of March 2018. If you are interested in joining the Beta, you can drop us an email at info@valaa.com, use the contact form at https://valaa.com or send us a message in Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/valaainspire/.