What Is Ubiquity

--- AndyGlew

One of the strengths of wiki is its ubiquity. Wiki leverages the ubiquity of web browsers: most computers have web browsers, and given a browser they can view and edit nearly any wiki page on any wiki.

What does it mean to be Ubiquitous?

Basically, a ubiquitous facility will just work, on nearly any computer system of interest.

Nothing special needs to be installed. (Or, if something needs to be installed, it can be installed transparently and automatically.)

Ubiquitous is not portable

There are many portable systems, such as the portable scripting language Ruby.

However, as of the time I write this, most computers do not have Ruby already installed. Therefore, Ruby is not ubiquitous.

Or: Ruby may be ubiquitously portable. But it is not ubiquitously installed.

Relative Ubiquity

Ubiquity is never absolute. It is relative to your problem domain or market.

E.g. for my concerns, I am interested mainly in Linux and Windows {2000,XP} running on x86 processors. A solution that is ubiquitous to these systems is good enough for me.

What is ubiquitous?

Web browsers are pretty much ubiquitous.

JavaScript is ubiquitous in most modern web browsers.

Java is not, unfortunately, ubiquitous. I wish it were. But, e.g. at my place of work very few PCs have Java installed.

It is probably reasonable to say that Perl is ubiquitous on modern Linux systems, since it is preinstalled in most distributions. Ditto Python. Ruby not really.

Unfortunately, none of these - Perl, Python, etc. - can be considered to be ubiquitously preinstalled on Windows systems.

Server based solutions are more likely to be ubiquitously usable without requiring anything to be installed on the client. All of the installation and configuration is done on the server; the client just has to use its web browser.

Why do I care about Ubiquity?