One of the great things about Web 2.0 is that almost anybody with talent and luck can get into the game.  Unlike the pre-2001 bubble, which was marked by big, expensive software development costs and required the endless ramping up of high-overhead people,  much of the current phase of web-application growth is fueled by free or low-cost applications like blogs and wikis or built directly for the web with Ajax using existing APIs.  As a result, innovations are not confined to traditional hubs like Silicon Valley but are pretty much wherever there are clever people.  Small is not only beautiful, it levels the playing field.

Saltanera Teknologi, an Indonesian e-business company, is driving an open source collaboration project to build a new PHP enterprise-level application development and deployment environment. One of the products is an open source platform for PHP called Klorofil Platform.

Klorofil has just released a demo of a desktop environment called Purefect Desktop designed to make AJAX application development easier.  The company says Purefect was built to help developers (and ISVs) create RIA-based applications that can be deployed on an intranet portal and they take great pains to say that it is distinctly not intended to be a “web operating system” (although it is more full featured and stable, even at this early stage, than YouOS).

Purefect has most of the usual web desktop features like a text processor but its most interesting applications are fairly unique.  For example, there is a Web-Based “drag and drop” IDE called Kambium that allows users to combine objects and build their own Purefect applications.  There is also an instant messaging application that allows you to chat with other users.   You can change the wallpaper and there is a handy file explorer for keeping track of projects.  

The Klorofil folks stress that this is only a demo and they are anxious to get some feedback.  Personally, I’m impressed.  The IDE alone is a terrific tool and the whole thing feels like it was built by real enterprise software engineers with industrial-strength intranet use in mind.  Alas, the current version only supports Mozilla Firefox although more browsers will be added in the future.