The advances of browsers as they continue to implement HTML5 features have begun to redefine how we write code and where it is placed. With the expansion of RESTful services and the power of new JavaScript based libraries we are seeing more code executed in the browser than ever before.
Browser code has become more testable and better organized. Code can be reused and software patterns implemented. Ultimately what this means is that developers can now enhance their application performance by utilizing the hardware of the host machine more than ever before. No longer is a web server required to do most of the heavy lifting, and even less if not any of the presentation.
We won’t really be there until we can count on the client having a fully enabled HTML5 capable browser, or client application. With much of the software development moving to small form devices, this is even less of an issue, as they can often natively utilize RESTful services. But the browser is close to providing a viable replacement for the native gui environments of XWindows, Machintosh, or Windows.
Perhaps HTML5 and JavaScript will go even farther than the Java language in working in virtually any computing device. As long as you are writing applications requiring a GUI user interface, it seems this is a wave of the near future.
Are you moving to HTML5 and Client Side Scripting? What is the impact to our existing WPF, MVC, MVVM and many other technologies we have been working so hard to learn and implement for the last few years? Is it worth the re-tooling? Leave your comment here, or drop me an Email at btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben