deja vu all over again
by bear
As Mark Pilgrim outlines in his latest post Silly Season some of the recent marketing-hyped releases: Adobe Apollo and Microsoft Silverlight; could easily be a Web 2.0ish re-run of items that only us “old timers” probably remember. Using my personal way-back machine (aka Google) I located two example articles that hopefully serve to illustrate my point. The content of the articles isn’t really important, but rather the discussion each article is having with the audience of their time.
DCOM, ActiveX and Corba must livetogether (Application Development Trends, July 2001)
The world of object technology is hot, and in the appealing class of technology known as middleware, object middleware is the fastest growing category.
Web Applications at Your Service (BYTE Magazine, July 1997)
The good news is that competition is spurring vendors to fill in their technology gaps at a stunning pace. Based on what we’ve seen in current shipping and beta products, soon companies of all sizes will be able to use Web sites as collaborative computing environments.
The point I’m trying to make is that in the past the battle of web applications has been fought (and lost) and the only losers were developers who swallowed the bait hard and then ended up with distributed applications (that is what we called Web 2.0 back then) that didn’t work for some of the same reasons as today’s apps are facing.
Now admittedly some of the issues are due to scaling to hundreds of thousand, if not millions, of clients but you have to remember that todays internet is a hell of a lot faster than private WANs were in the 90’s. Mark’s recollections are limited to web apps from earlier in this decade and my recollections are to distributed apps from the 90’s, but I think they are similiar points – that until the framework is as open as the core protocols that drive the internet we will always be repeating history, but in a bad way.
I was wondering earlier if Mark had any room in his unpainted wooden shed, but then I remembered that I stopped doing GUI/Front-end app work for a reason and moved back to the nice simple world of CLI ;)