InfoQ Homepage Presentations Now What?
Now What?
58:20
Summary
Dylan Schiemann presents the current status of web development engulfed in lots of frameworks, languages, and browsers, advising on choosing the right technologies to secure the future of a web application.
Bio
Dylan Schiemann is CEO of SitePen and co-founder of the Dojo Toolkit, an open source JavaScript toolkit for rapidly building web sites and applications, and is an expert in the technologies and opportunities of the Open Web.
About the conference
QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community.QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.
Jul 21, 2010
Community comments
Video cuts short?
by Neil Gibbons,
The web is a hack but...
by Paul Beckford,
Re: The web is a hack but...
by Robert Sullivan,
Video cuts short?
by Neil Gibbons,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
Seems to end at about 13:07?
The web is a hack but...
by Paul Beckford,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
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.
Re: The web is a hack but...
by Robert Sullivan,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
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.