WebApptitude: The Rise of Web Apps and Web 2.0

The day of the Web Apps has arrived. Everywhere one looks these days, real live desktop-style applications can be found online. Word processing. Calendars. Spreadsheets. Image Editing. And it's all storable, tagible, editable, shareable, and thanks to new technology approaches like AJAX, good to use. Google is of course leading the pack, but there are many other innovators, including Salesforce.Com, Netflix, and many more.

It all means that the Web is not just for Web sites and Web pages any more. Like a desktop, a Web "page" can be an information space with clickable, dragable icons that can perform a kind of magic. And the Webtop is making major inroads on the desktop as the central stage of computing and, in fact, of global culture.

What marks the evolution from the Desktop to the Webtop user experience? Well, kids, here's a quick history lesson. Desktop computing, pioneered by Xerox Parc in the 1970s, went commercial in 1984 with the Apple Macintosh. It went global with Windows in 1995 (yes, it took MS more than 10 years to catch up to the clickable, graphical operating environment.) 

But around the same time, the World Wide Web stepped onto the scene thanks to Mosaic, the first Web "browser," which put a graphical overlay on the Internet, a shared hypertext environment originally launched by the Pentagon in 1969 to help government and university scientists share information. The principals behind Mosaic commercialized it in Netscape, and throughout the 90s, Web 1.0 rose at incredible speed.

At that time, though, the Web was viewed as primarily a digital publishing medium and a place to send e-mail. For serious things, you still had to go buy your boxed software, and then install it, read the manual, troubleshoot it, and pray that it didn't get into a fight with another piece of software already on your desktop ecosystem.

Fastforward to today: 2007. Over 20 years after desktop computing, Webtop computing is coming into its own, thanks to many factors, including: shared standards, separation of design from function, better bandwidth, cheaper storage, increased interoperability, and the demands of the new networked society for easier and better ways of working. 

Webtop computing means that end users can avoid losing time constantly fighting with the complexity and software conflicts of their own computers and the stage-hogging antics of their operating systems. And the capability you see today is just a small sign of the things to come.

Comments

[alwazer]

Thank you
The article is quite remarkable

[scottherringla]

I see three areas worth mentioning on this topic: flexibility, functionality and security.

As we will see in the next 5-10 years, "centralization" of web applications will come at a price. There's a tug-of-war relationship between the users and the IT department, and we're currently moving away from desktop autonomy to centralized IT. The users will eventually want more than IT can deliver, so we'll see a snap-back to the desktops in the next generation. Centralization is great for standards, but with those standards comes functionality compromise.

It's also important to compare the power of a desktop app with webapps - granted, RIA is coming along, but it's done with browser plug-ins. Browsers, for those of us who have built webapps, have limitations and create their own IT challenges, particularly across operating systems. Writing a native Windows or Mac app still provides way more functionality since you have direct control of O/S functions, rather than relying on an interpretive plug-in or AJAX.

And finally, security adds a huge overhead to webapps that really wasn't as big a deal with client/server or desktop apps. Posting mission-critical, private information online requires significant investment in wrapping things securely. How many nightly security updates will we endure to support this webapp model? And yes, the IT guys have to pay particular attention to newly-discovered vulnerabilities.

The web hasn't set us free - it just exploded the scalability of our applications and networks. As far as usability (hopefully the real topic of this blog), we're getting more tools all the time. That's great... We still have to proceed with caution in deployment...