Weblications (blog by Adam Rifkin)
Relax, Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled: Weblications:
"With web-based software, most users won't have to think about anything except the applications they use.
All the messy, changing stuff will be sitting on a server somewhere,
maintained by the kind of people who are good at that kind of thing...
Desktop software forces users to become system administrators.
Web-based software forces programmers to. There is less stress in
total, but more for the programmers..."
Unfortunately the state of web-based application development is rather sorry today. It is not as easy as simple native program development - inspite of all the MVC models, devel environments (such as Struts), and so on. There are simply so many mistakes one can make.
And, if ASP is the way to go, then what could enable rather a large scale offering of web-based applications for end users? A simple deployment environment from a big vendor such as yahoo or google. (Let us call them "deployment vendor"). Such an environment would
- Provide a clean mechanism for creating standards-based front-ends but enhanced by rich-client capabilities offered by such vendors.
- Be completely cross platform - since the deployment vendor can take care of variety of browser compatibility issues. And eventually be able to dictate a standard. (For example, we might reject a desktop platform because applications provided by google don't render well on its browser.)
- Be able to create high availability capability due to caching and other technologies - bringing the ASP app to the nearest node.
- Be able to offer a rich language processing and voice capabilities effectively creating better interaction with the applications.
- Be able to support variety of platforms such as mobile devices, PDAs etc.
- Provide offline capabilities.
And perhaps there are many other points. While most of these are usual ASP requirements, the enhancements because the vendor like google or yahoo have abundance of computing power, and can effectively create application development models around their infrastructure, is a different twist to traditional ASP.
And hopefully, these enhancements expressly incorporate principles of The web way.
