Now What?

Recorded at:

Seems to end at about 13:07?

Nice presentation. Interestingly it doesn't offer a vision. Now that can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your sensibilities. Being a purest I would love to see the (open) web hack disappear overnight. What are we really trying to do? To my mind the future is SaaS and the Browser as a platform. Progress to this end is already being made. Take a look at Objective-J and Cappuccino:

cappuccino.org/

Why bother with all this markup when you've got a canvas? We've been producing pretty good bitmapped UIs on the desktop for decades. Also a javascript runtime doesn't mean you need to write your app in Javascript. Javascript makes for a very good universal assembly language for OO languages. So why not write in a high level language that is then compiled to javascript? Ruby, Objective-J, Newspeak, what ever you like.

Beyond just rendering content and creating compelling UI's SaaS also presents other challenges, like how do we upgrade and modify applications whilst they are still running? People are looking into this stuff and it seems like a credible vision to me, especially with language level support:

gbracha.blogspot.com/2010/04/brave-new-world-of...

Of course the pragmatic advice is to evolve with the web one hack at a time. Ugly but popular it seems.

Paul.

I'm kind of in the same thought line as you. If that's a word. Amazing that we are basically still hacking together sites with a thousand different technologies, php, perl, ruby, java, servlets, html, html 5, css, xsl, and an equal assortment of massively complex frameworks where you have shifted into the netherworld of xml-land to code your apps (spring comes to mind). As someone pointed out, XML should never have been used in this purpose, it's designed for messaging, not as a language.

That Objective-j looks pretty neat - until I read the part about the compiler, and having to debug through the browser. So it has promise, but it will be great when it has better compiler and debugging support.