The web is at 2.0 version. Or at least this is the buzz word of the day. The social web. The new Internet.Actually I think that no one knows where are we at this moment. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Adobe, they all have their own vision about the web. And this to name only a few.
The world is small
I've heard in a TV ad the other day: the world is small. The globalization theory is considering the economical, the political and the cultural aspects of the human life. But there is another: the informational aspect. We are surrounded now by information. Right now this is not the most important aspect of our life as a global nation. For some individuals (like myself) it is, but for a lot of people the other three aspects of life are a lot more important.
In a lot of countries the information comes from a political or religious leader. In others, the "free and liberal" countries, the information comes from TV and newspapers.[I've quoted free and liberal as in fact, from the ancient time when the homo sapiens was hunting and collecting fruits, the human race has not been really free. We are now bound to a society and to the laws, to our credits and generally to what is considered a normal social behavior. And I do not say that as it would be a wrong thing but only to state a fact. There is no fun in freedom if it's chaos.]
Playground and Office
We get our information from the web and we need our information to be fresh. We are in a newspaper store and we are looking for the last hour news not for a day old newspaper. We need our information to be condensed and to the point (not like this article tends to be). We are in a hurry and we do not have time to waste. And more to this, if the delivered information is already filtered to our needs (more like the sport section in a newspaper) it's a lot better.
We also work, play, shop and date on the web. The web is our playground and also our office. For those of us who read more emails in one day that letters in the whole life, for those of us who write easier on laptop and only use a pen to write down their signature on some paper, the web 2.0 is a promise and maybe a part of reality. (Of course if we can also make some money out of it... )
Let's now consider the following. Five years ago a 128kb network connection was affordable only by companies. Now I'm writing this article at my laptop at home over a 512kb network connection and that is the cheapest one I can get from my cable provider. This tells us one thing. The days of simple and slick html are over. Maybe there are few of us that still appreciate a simple site but we are only relics of the past. Bandwidth is no longer a problem and web applications care less and less about it. Radio over the net, VoIP, video streaming.
Web applications grew in complexity also. Google maps, Amazon, Yahoo.. are all this web 2.0?
Enter RIA.
Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are web applications that have the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications. RIA's typically transfer the processing necessary for the user interface to the web client but keep the bulk of the data (i.e maintaining the state of the program, the data etc) back on the application server. (definition from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_Application)
So, web applications vs. desktop application. Web is becoming our office so tools for this kind of office emerge. We keep out information on the web so we need tools to work with that information. We can now edit our documents on the net with Word like tools, we can edit images, write emails on dedicated servers and read news on special aggregators.
So we have web applications that behave more and more like desktop ones. Will desktop application change to behave more like web applications? Not likely. The changes will be on the web side. They will change to behave like desktop applications but not loosing their benefits.
The future
What will emerge, I think, will be a generic client-server application. The interface will be defined in a new definition language (maybe that language is here, XUL and MXML are potential candidates), the client application logic will be written in an ECMA n.0 language (JavaScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0, both look promising) and the data sharing between client and server will be done in an XML format(json supporters will hang me for the heresy but I have my reasons not to suspect a long life for it).
If everything is on the web, the data, the applications, we will need something to manage all this: WebOS. WEB 3.0?
