Move over, ubiquitous computing - transparent computing is here

Day 2 of Intel’s 2012 developer forum opened in San Francisco today with a keynote address from Renee James – senior vice president and general manager of the company’s Software and Services Group.

James spoke about ‘transparent computing’, as the next age after the past decade’s push for ‘ubiquitous computing’.

Ubiquitous computing refers to the availability of computing devices everywhere, and in every aspect of life. From James’ explanation, the term ‘Transparent computing’ appears to refer to an environment-agnostic computing experience, where applications function seamlessly and familiarly across different hardware architectures and software platforms.

James emphasised the importance of three areas to transparent computing: a cross-platform programming language or development environment, flexible cloud services to underpin applications, and security from the device-level to the datacentre-level.

Talk of a cross-platform programming language echoes efforts of the late 1990s and early 2000s, in which Sun Microsystems aimed to provide a ‘write once, run anywhere’ or WORA programming model through its Java platform.

James acknowledged the history of WORA, but focused on the contemporary HTML5 platform and emphasising Intel’s commitment to the standard – calling it “a real solution for where users want to go, and where users will demand we go as an industry”. James also stated that “we want to make sure it doesn’t go the way that other promised languages have gone”, in what may be a reference to Sun’s Java (now owned by Oracle).


Harley Ogier is attending IDF 2012 as a guest of Intel.