Saturday 27 December 2008

How far the web has gone

Two signs of how far the web has gone. The second is pretty cool, though.

1. Google Native Client, runs native binary code inside the browser, deploying the necessary binaries just in time of browsing the page.
http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/

2. VisualWebGUI, implements Windows.Forms in web context using AJAX, so after replacing System.Windows.Forms references to Gizmox.WebGUI.Forms and moving the source to a new project, your forms work on the web.
http://www.visualwebgui.com/Community/Resources/QuickStarts/tabid/365/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/392/How-to-Migrate-a-WinForms-application-to-the-Web-using-Visual-WebGui.aspx

Earlier than this, we were trying to run web applications on offline machines, mostly using installation packs containing middleware like apache/php/mysql. I guess the basic drive behind this was to make offline machines run the same application. They weren't rare at that moment, but now offline machines are barely considered as proper computers.

We're trying to run web applications locally, and local applications on the web. We're desperate.

Java was right to the spot, and 7 years before .net was there. I don't know, maybe it was too early for the concept, or Sun couldn't make a good job on keeping Java up to date. But I'm sad to see Java is dying. How do I know? Because Java programmers are paid well these days.