Thoughts by Sarge

I remember my first web application. It was late 1996 / early 1997 using IIS 3.0 from my MSN subscription CD’s.

I was using a home grown b-tree system for a database and I needed to expose the data to a web application. My solution was to write COM wrappers for my domain specific data objects and use ASP 1.0 + VBScript for the web application. I was thrilled that I could use COM and IDispatch to hook all of my C++ code to VBScript and use that not only for developing web applications, but also for hooking it up to VBA within Microsoft Office applications.

I really liked the solution. Using VBA, we could do mail merges, export data to spreadsheets, etc.

Except two things… I really hated HTML, and the cross browser compatibility (or rather, incompatibility) caused a hellish nightmare. I know “hate” is a strong word, but it doesn’t even come close to describing my antipathy for web development.

My first web app was my last web app for 13 years. Anytime someone would even mention “thin client” in a design discussion, I’d cringe in disgust… if someone mentioned it seriously, I’d figure out a way to stay out of the client side development, or I’d update my resume and start looking for a new job.

I really despised HTML web app hell… but time marches on, and so do technologies.

Recently, a few things have changed, and I’m actually starting to reconsider my views on web apps.

HTML5 is coming along nicely, and the most popular browsers among geeks already support a large chunk of it. Microsoft is finally abandoning their proprietary renderer and IE9 will probably actually be a good browser. Finally. It only took ‘em 15 years.

While Adobe and Microsoft continue trying to make the web platform proprietary with Flash and Silverlight, thankfully Google and Apple see the light. Open standards for the web is the only way we, the little guys, will have a chance to defeat the oligopoly that exists for computer software.

Although there are still a lot of incompatibilities remaining in browsers, many of the most annoying things are well documented, and there are a lot of tools and SDK’s available to help you avoid them or
fix them.

With recent additions to these SDK’s like GWT, and with some extensions that are part of HTML5 that are slowly but surely making their way into browsers, web applications are quickly approaching the capabilities of many applications that previously could only be done using a thick client.

For an idea on how powerful they can be, take a look at Google Docs. The forms, the spreadsheets, the word processor are all very powerful. These apps are made without the use of any proprietary plugins…. they’re pure, standards compliant HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

It seems that many people are wanting to move everything to the cloud, using only thin client applications. Neat goal… I can see why Apple, Amazon and Google want to go this route. It’s a perfect way to take down the desktop OS and desktop office application monopolies.

If we keep improving these standards through things like WebGL, add JIT compilers for JavaScript, it won’t be long before we’re living on the cloud for all but our most demanding applications.

This is a great thing if you think about it. The general non-geek populous hate computers. They’re difficult to understand, they get viruses and malware, they take forever to reboot and the list goes on and on.

Artists, developers, content creators, and other geek types will likely continue using their desktop computers, but the casual computer user will likely switch to something like an iPad or a Google Chrome OS slate computer.

Finally… the web is ready for real applications.