Beyond the Browser

Beyond the Browser John Coggeshall

Introductions
Welcome!
About me
CTO of Automotive Computer Services (ACS)
Core PHP 5 Dev
Author, Speaker
John Coggeshall Presentation Title

In the beginning….
1969: Internet was Born
The first 4 node computer network
UCLA
Stanford Research Institute
UC Santa Barbara
University of Utah

1993
1993: The first web browser is created by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Within one year becomes the dominate way to “browse” the web (surpassing Gopher)

1995-…
1995: Rasmus Lerdorf implements the first incarnation of PHP (in Perl) called PHP / FI
1995: JavaScript first introduced in Netscape 2.0B3 by Brendan Eich
1997: PHP / FI 2.0 and PHP 3.0 released
1999: PHP 4.0
2004: PHP 5.0

So it stayed.. Mostly
Between 1993 and 2009 things have continued to grow, but fundamentally have stayed the same
WWW Servers producing content
Browsers consuming content
2005: The term AJAX was coined
2006: “Service Oriented Architecture” started flying around

2009
For the first time in 16 years we as an industry really have more to consider than just browsers when writing web applications
Mobile Applications
Desktop Applications (i.e. Flex, Titanium)
Other web-based apps (i.e. www.planet-php.net )
“SOA” has truly now arrived

Coming of Age of SOA
Today writing a “web application” no longer means a browser application
This shift comes with new expectations of the internet market
Especially important for you, the developers, to realize
Here’s my observations

Playing Catch-up
First: If you’re application does not provide some sort of feed, API, etc. it needs to
Expectation for a new web application
Existing applications need to start thinking about retro-fitting to catch up if not already done

Too many dialects
There are way too many dialects
SOAP, XML-RPC, XML, JSON, AMF, RSS to name a few
Need to as an industry standardize on one or two
Or even better, write our applications to speak more than one
XML
JSON
AMF

Not everything is a nail
There is an old adage, if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail
Programmers are especially susceptible to this
Very important that the correct tools are chosen for the correct Jobs
PHP is great at running web applications, but not so much running on the client
Likewise, HTML/CSS/JS isn’t the best tool to write desktop applications

Mobile Applications
My prediction: We will either all know Java or known Objective-C within 3 years
Mobile applications are quickly becoming an expectation for companies with an internet presence
Web-interfaces, no matter how robust, don’t win
(i.e. Facebook’s iPhone web-app vs. it’s native one)
Impossible to write without good backend architectures

A return to the past
As Internet developers we must return to lessons learned in the past and re-acquire skills
Version Control and Product Management is a great example
Think of problems and solutions from the late 80s and early 90s, I expect them to happen again now
MFC == ZF? It’s possible, so what’s next?

Peripherals
Outside of the browser, hardware matters
Barcode scanners, other USB devices
No solution really exists yet
Would make a great OSS project to solve

Bottom line
In the end, the browser just isn’t as cool as it was anymore
We’ve reached the end of it’s capabilities in a lot of ways IMHO
New more robust technologies will emerge to take over
Standard web will become one of many interfaces, but likely not the primary
Smart developers will begin planning for this market shift now

We’re Hiring!
Thank you!
See our full-page ad in the conference program and visit us at the Job Fair!

Beyond the Browser

by John Coggeshall on Mar 05, 2009

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Beyond the Browser — Presentation Transcript