Matt Prokes

Alpha Edition!, e-mail spelling/grammer/topic suggestions to mattprokes@gmail.com

The Professional Developer Series
Volume 2, Web Development
Chapter 1.4 Web Development Trends
Page: #22

Javascript, now more then ever is becoming of increasing importance. For those companies that want to deliver rich platform agnostic applications out to their users, javascript is the only way to get it done. The best part is, possibilities that javascript opens up are endless and its this authors belief that we will be talking about the langauge for years and years to come. So what are some of the javascript based trends that we are seeing today, and will be seeing in the future.

Trend 1:  Stop delivering dynamic server generated web content. As webapplications progress more and more companies are finding out that really all they need a server to deliver these days is web application code, and data. Javascript is slowly trending toward being server technology agnostic, especially with the advent of json it no longer matters where the data is coming from as long as there is data, thats all that matters (data driven applications). Pretty much all web applications these days can be delivered as flat .html files.

Trend 2:  Rich Browser Applications. As web applications evolve we are finding that in many cases you can save the webapplication to the desktop and use it regardless of wheither it is online or offline! Basically allowing a person to use a browser based application as a replacement for a regular desktop application, all that is required is a javascript based browser. Technologies such as Google Gears, Dojo, and a few new ones presented in this book allow such applications to exist. We will be building a few rich browser applications throughout this book.

Trend 3:  Data Mashed Web Applications. Need to get data from many locations to build and analyse useful information? This is what data mashing, and data mining is all about. You can use javascript these days to build dynamic map content, and create collaborative information sets for your users. Information services such as Yahoo Pipes, Popfly, and Semantic Web Pipes .

Trend 4: Intelligent Web Applications. When people think artificial intilligence, often I see thoughts conjured of a computer that knows all, sees all, and can communicate fluently with humans, solving all the worlds problems. In reality AI won’t probably be something that arises from the ashes of a genius programmer that created the next HAL system. No, what is most likely to happen is the development of a system which is asked questions, and is able to dynamically analyse correct sets of existing data and come up with a solution. Computers’ intelligence based on the current state of technology is completely dependent on what we contribute to them. We often call this computational analytics, today javascript is often used to drive the next generation of intelligent web based applications.

Trend 5: Collaborative Media Applications/Groupware. This set of javascript applications is specifically targeted at collaborative media, and and communication. Applications such as google docs, facebook, myspace, youtube, and more. All of these media companies provide javascript based collaboration. Probably the most striking would be google docs collaboration tools that allow you to write a document in a tool similar to word, but it also allows several people to write a single document all at one time! Another example is chatting on facebook, you can communicate with your friends right from the website using a javascript based chat application. I expect in the future to only see more and more of these applications as their popularity increases.

Trend 6: Javascript Frameworks. Javascript as a language and native api is actually very small compared to other langauges out there. While very small, the functionality the langauge provided was very powerful. So what people started doing is building up API’s around the langauge which they could leverage to make their job of programming more easy. Frameworks were a great innovation for the language, and it is very likely that people wouldn’t think to build the collaborative applications they do today with javascript if great frameworks for the language didn’t exist. A good list of frameworks are JQuery, Dojo, YUI, MooTools, and many others. Often libraries attempt to make up for javascripts cross platform compatibility issues, and also try to make the language more easy to code.

Trend 7: Taking javascript beyond the web. I don’t know how many people know this but firefox is actually coded in javascript. Now you may sit back and wonder how can that be? The number of non-web-browser technologies based on javascript  is actually increasing, and since it is the most popular programming language in the world many organizations are beginning to offer javascript apis for their products. See, just like xml, there are many technologies out there that understand the javascript language. Projects such as firefox, linux gnome, jaxer, and many others are beginning to implement these “javascript interpreters” and thus are able to extend their applications using the javascript langauge.

Trend 8: Javascript is becoming the new duct-tape of the web. Like Perl was a few years ago for getting things done, javascript is beginning to increasingly replace that role, expect that trend to continue as we me toward a more and more online world.

Tags: web developer 1.4

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 26th, 2009 at and is filed under Javascript, Technical, web development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.