How will the WWW look like in 2020? Any answer to this question will of course be inaccurate. A few years ago I learned that a regular calendar year is equal to 7 web years. So looking 91 years into the future would be pure guesswork. The question requires us to examine the past, present and near future to discover what direction we need to look. Many people claim that we have gone a far way from the early dark ages of computing and we have, but in my opinion not everything is proceeding at lightning speed. Take programming languages for example.
Here's a simple hello world application written in Ada.
Here's the same application written in C#
Comparison Comparing the similarities is easy for the trained eye. Knowing your history will tell you that there are 56 years between these languages were conceived. The point I am making here is
not that innovation doesn't happen. My point is that things might not move as fast as we think it does. Another thing history might teach us is how mother nature moves in waves. Even the roman empire failed in the end. If we look at financial markets they expand and contract. Typically in 10 year periods. I think the processing and storage of computer power share the same characteristics. Shared processing like we are experiencing when browsing the World Wide Web is nothing new either. In fact Big Iron (mainframes) were centralized and connected to by dumb terminals. You may now be asking the question that the WWW has been around for longer than 17 years and thus kept the centralized model valid for more than it's 10 year period? The answer might be a little bit more complex, but internet is very much about downloading huge amounts of data to playback offline (aka, big harddisks, smart clients, ipods, smartphones, etc). This picture is unlikely to change until we have accomplished two things. Enough bandwith and Always-on-Always-connected. When that happens it will be of no meaning to download movies of HD quality, when they can just aswell be played realtime!
Present So were are we now? We are in the present. A lot of the big companies are rivaling about the next version of the WWW. Adobe bets their future on the Flash environment, Microsoft pushes the WPF technology. While both of these key players are in for a fight, companies like Google, Amazon, Sun, Oracle and Apple will not stand still and wait.
The Web has evolved since Tim Berners-Lee put forward the HTML standard in 1989 (18 years ago), but if you right click most web pages today and choose view source, HTML is mostly still in there and evolves slowly, just like programming languages. In fact, a month ago Tim Berners-Lee started working on HTML 5.0. HTML is open technology, free and multiplatform. WPF and Flash will not work unless you install the runtime. You need proprietary, binary code on your computer to allow these applications to run. What makes this different from regular installable applications?
NOTHING! Microsoft.NET 2.0 also allow you to run your Windows Forms applications from a browser (clickOnce) as long as the Framework is installed on the computer. The thinking behind this technology is not new either. Microsoft made ActiveX Controls available for use in the browser and so did Sun with their Java Applets. Hardly anybody speaks of ActiveX anymore and if they do, it's often not for the better of it. So, if it sucked back then, why doesn't it suck now?
Future Let's use the past and the present to construct the envisioned future. Let's try and make some assumptions. HTML will probably be around for another 20 years. The tenets of AJAX will be increasingly more important for logic, speed and development. We will gradually move towards centralized processing with global unlimited wireless bandwith. Multipurpose applications can be fully browser based, but is expected to be combined with other applications like WPF and Flash and form the future RIA (Rich Internet Applications) environment. Moore's law has been pushed to the limits and we can expect not faster processors, but more of them. I think it's safe to say that we can expect regular pc's to have as many as 16-32 core CPUs in the near future and growing. This means increased emphasis on scalable architecture (parallell processing) and applications that are asynchronous of nature.
Place your bets! New technology is more rapidly making its way on the digital highway, but most of it is old stuff reinvented. If you want to take some old advice from a fellow programmer: Start your editor and continue targeting the browser. Your applications will have broader reach, zero DLL hell, single point of upgrade, and the list goes on. Just don't pick the wrong frameworks.
It's the good
old new internet days.
Welcome to Wild, Wild West 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 with Jesse James lurking in the shadows