Web-application ramblings
Adam Rifkin recently wrote a great piece about weblications. It’s a nice primer on the subject with some good quotes and examples and many great links. It offers an overview of what’s been going on in this area in ‘04, inevitably with a focus on google’s gmail and google suggest offerings.
In it was also a link to the kuro5hin-article “web-apps are the legacy apps of the future” which briefly deconstructs the blatant weaknesses of state-of-the-art web technologies utilized in web-apps. All points raised there are valid, with most problems boiling down to the statelessness of the technologies involved. Nonetheless where others see limitations, i see opportunities. The technologies at hand are far from perfect, but there are already obvious advantages to web-apps even at this early stage like centralized upgrades and no need for installations.
The first e-mail client i ever used was a web-app and i dare to say that the same holds true for at least 90% of netizens these days. Web-apps have been around for years now and they’re here to stay.