May 18, 2006
The Future of Web Applications?
Google creates some really nice cross browser AJAX based Javascript applications. Now they have released their internal development environment in a package called the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). This toolkit is Java 2 Enterprise Edition based and resolves around developing your application completely as Java code that then is compiled and turned into Javascript when the client requests a page. This is the same approach as used in Ruby on Rails and has the benefit of cleaning up the code and making it easier to create the server and client side code and they are one and the same with the framework handling the details.
So what is happening here? Well we are starting to see more and more of these frameworks becoming available for web developers to use. These are reducing the complexity to create advanced web applications therefore we are getting more interaction and more true web applications, rather than just web pages that provide a function. I believe that this will continue to grow and the line between web application and standard desktop application will start to blur. What we will see as the next generation are applications that are developed once and run as either server side applications or client hosted applications that then connect back to a data source for their data. This results in write once, run anyway (connected, disconnected, standalone, client/server or even peer to peer).
Links
Google Web Toolkit
