{"id":969,"date":"2008-10-10T09:57:40","date_gmt":"2008-10-10T08:57:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/969-future-of-web-apps-2008-day-one-web-is-dvd-desktop-vhs.html"},"modified":"2008-10-10T09:57:40","modified_gmt":"2008-10-10T08:57:40","slug":"future-of-web-apps-2008-day-one-web-is-dvd-desktop-vhs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/969-future-of-web-apps-2008-day-one-web-is-dvd-desktop-vhs.html","title":{"rendered":"Future of Web Apps 2008 Day One: Web is DVD, desktop VHS"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m at London’s dreary Excel centre for Carson’s Future of Web Apps<\/a> conference, just before the opening of day two. Yesterday was a mixed bag; good when speakers talk technical; bad when they descend into marketing. The origins of the conference are as a start-up incubator; developers and entrepreneurs getting together to see what’s new and make contacts. It still has some of that flavour, but it has grown beyond that because web apps are a mainstream topic and Carson attracts generally excellent speakers. There is a good crowd here; I’m not sure if every last ticket sold, but it is pretty much packed out, though the dark economic mood is dampening spirits.<\/p>\n

Digg’s<\/a> Kevin Rose spoke briefly about his site’s new recommendation engine, which has been active since July or so. The idea is that Digg learns a user’s profile by examining clicks and votes, using it to customize what the user sees. He spoke about a forthcoming feature, where third-party sites will be able to call the Digg recommendation engine to get profile information that it can then use to customize its own site.<\/p>\n

An interesting idea; though it raises several questions. How does it work – would logging out of Digg be sufficient to disable it? Will users opt-out or opt-in? How much of this kind of customization do we want anyway?<\/p>\n

This whole theme of contextualization is a big one here; it ties in closely with social networking, and Google’s OpenSocial API is getting quite a bit of attention.<\/p>\n

Blaine Cook (ex Twitter now Yahoo, Ruby guy and inventor of OAuth) gave a though-provoking session on scalability along with Joe Stump from Digg (and a PHP guy). They took the line that languages don’t matter – partly a reflection on Twitter’s scaling problems and whether it was Ruby’s fault. Other factors make language efficiency unimportant, they said, such as disk I\/O and network speed; and the secret of scaling is multiple and redundant cheap boxes and apps which are segmented so that no one box  is a bottleneck. The case was overstated but the main points strike me as sound.<\/p>\n

I’m wondering how many of the developers here are actually having to deal with these kinds of scalability problems. Many web apps get only light use; the problems for everyday developers are different.<\/p>\n

I attended a session entitled "The future of Enterprise Web Apps" by Googler Kevin Marks. It turned out to be a plug for the OpenSocial<\/a> API; not what I was expecting.<\/p>\n

Francisco Tolmasky of 280slides.com<\/a> evangelised his Objective-J and Cappucino JavaScript framework, based loosely on Apple’s Cocoa framework. Hmm, bit like SproutCore<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I give Tolmasky credit for the most striking analogy of the day. The Web is DVD is says, and the desktop VHS. Adobe’s AIR is a combo player. He is talking about transition and leaving us in no doubt about what he sees is the future of the desktop.<\/p>\n

Best sessions of the day (that I attended) were Blaine Cook on Jabber and its XMPP protocol, and David Recordon from SixApart<\/a> on the evolving Internet "open stack". In this he includes:<\/p>\n