Categories: uncategorized
Date: 28 September 2005 09:44:21
It's easy to get into a rut with web development of trying to do the same old things again, but in a better way. Let's take out old GCI programs and rewrite them in PHP. Let's take our old MS Access database e-commerce system and upgrade it to SQL Server. Let's make a version of Word that works in a browser.
However, as Paul reminds us, a lot of people want something new. And when it comes to web apps there's a whole world of possibilities that have been opened to us developers which just wasn't possible with traditional desktop apps.
What I really want from Ajax apps is for them to do stuff that it's too hard to do with binary apps. I want them to be sensibly integrated with online resources; I want them to support realtime collaboration. I want them to do different stuff from Word/Excel/Powerpoint, not just do the same thing with a different engine under the hood.
So, what can we do? What does the web do that people might want better access to? What online data might they want linking together? What web apps could help people be more productive? Where might they want a simpler way of doing business online? These questions are the ones that will need answering to push this web 2.0 thing forward.