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May 8, 2006 :: Volume 2, Issue 4
Next Issue: May 2007

A Whole New Web

Posted by TimSlavin at April 30, 2005

"Something is happening right now, and the developer community has an electric gleam in its eye. Curious, inventive people are making cool stuff again. There’s been a notable shift, and it’s incredibly exciting.

We’re nearing the tenth anniversary of the Netscape IPO, when a flood of capital launched the Internet into mainstream culture. Those were heady times that changed the world. When I started as an interaction designer at Netscape in January of 1996, we were 750 people crammed three-to-a-cube into two small buildings."

I still have my t-shirt and bag from the first Netscape conference in New York City October 1996. So sign me up. I'm sure you're all tanned, rested, and ready since the late 1990's internet boom?

This breathless essay from adaptive path has more than a kernel of truth. Much of the promise of the early internet is only now becoming available.

For example, Google Maps is more than a bid to tap the market for local search engines. It's also a combination of technologies that adaptivepath, in an earlier essay, calls Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML). Ajax will make the internet even more useful and easy to use. While this functionality has been defined since around 1995, at the least, it's only now do-able.

I also would point you to, Completely Rethinking the Web, an excellent thought piece about the next generation of the web. The author is writing a series of such pieces, called Innovating the Web Experience.

Another promising technology these essays touch on, and a fun one, is called Ruby on Rails. What is it? They call their project "a full-stack, open-source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups." In plain English, it's a scripting language that uses (almost) plain English. Ruby bucks the trend of programming languages to be more and more complex, accessible only to real programmers. It's also lightweight, doing more with fewer lines of code.

Learn More

Here are a few links that extend these two essays if you want to explore what's next in internet technology.

Next Big Tech Ideas May Be Small
Software Turns .Net Into Flash
Rolling with Ruby (great how-to)
Exploring Ruby on Rails (Part 1)
Exploring Ruby on Rails (Part 2)
Really Getting Started in Rails (review of "Exploring Ruby" articles above)
Programming Ruby (aka Pickaxe II book)
Ruby Showdown with Java
Google News articles (last 30 days)

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