apps inside the browser

lets start with a wikiquote “in computer science, a user interface that allows navigation of objects with a connecting structure”, from Browser, Now most people when saying “browser” they refer to a Web Browser, now the only real difference is that the Web browser is specialized in reading html and anything related to it; therefore a web browser is just a UI to look at data, which if you look at it is the same thing most desktop applications do.

webapps now

Today webapplications are basicallly a db, and a logic layer that translate the db into something the web browser undestands. The best combination of this right now is implemented as xhtml + CSS with javascript async calls that return formatted XML that gets inserted by DOM manipulation into the original xhtml file, of couse the last part is the “heat” webapps are currently getting because today they are finally not slow.

Here are the current problems they have

• session management, the current implementation of this is very hackish
• offline access, most browsers suck at this and they can’t catch most data that is transfer today.
• of course 3D graphics is out of the question, since this is a whole new realm, although what could happen

webapps in the future

browsers are going to grow into more complex platforms the first steps are firefox extensions take something like flock which is a totally different app yet still firefox, or kupu that powers plone’s editor, look at it in action here (warning huge download) look at some of the most interesting extensions like allpeers

Now this is just the beggining lots of browsers are in the making like venice pro Joost, songbird and the democracy player to name a flew.

and many more will come…

So yes green IMO webapps are the future, it’s just that we don’t know what they are going to evolve into.