Modern corporations, like Google, are well known for their rich online applications or systems. Online Word, Online Spreadsheet, Online Sliders and Calendar etc., provide users better Internet surfing UX. There is no doubt that these applications are getting more complex than their ancestors, and people found that their behaviours are getting closer and closer to Desktop/Windows applications.

During recent years, a huge amount of work has been carried out my thousands of people, directly or indirectly, influenced the design pattern of internet applications. (You see they are now more like applications, rather than web pages.) These include, but not limited to, fully discovered power of Javascript, more organized W3C standards and their wide acceptance by worldwide Internet Developers, robust and standard compliant Web Browsers, as well as permeation of powerful PCs and Broadband Internet connections in most households. With all of these, and probably more, developers and users are ready to enter the new era of Internet, the so called Web 2.0.

A web application differs from a desktop application in that:

• First of all, their platforms are different; while desktop applications reside on operating systems, web applications are handled in a web browser, which in nature, is designed for retrieving informations from remote machines. This feature can be utilized in such a way that informations are stored in central servers, reducing the duplication of having each user to store the data on his/her own machine and sychronize it on regular basis.

• Secondly, web applications tend to be much more light-weighted. Generally, a web application is loaded each time a user requests the url in web browser. Therefore, upgrade and deployment of web applications are only need to be carried on on server side, which prunes the need for users to learn and trouble-shooting the installation of the application.

Just to name a few. So as web applications having so many differences with traditional desktop application, both in run-time and development process, is there going to be a new industry “Webware Industry” emerging in the next few years, or will web application development, eventually be merged into “Software Industry”, which in the past, doesn’t treat “web programming” as a software development practice.

For now, I would expect the IT industry, as a whole, will keep growing for at least 5 - 10 years, as there are so many works ahead of us, and web applications are still in their infancy period. With more functions specified in Javascript, more control over and features of DOM and CSS, more seriously designed web browses facilitating Web Applications, not to mention tons of frameworks that are being built by robust web2.0 companies, we could imagine one day, the only neccessary desktop application on our machine, is a web browser.

:)

It is a DIRTY lauch though, since I haven’t finish the coding yet..but you will see, more features are coming…and it will be good, and interesting.

Enjoy.

Update: This post is outdated. May 22, 2008.