A case for optimism? | Web Directions North

A case for optimism?

• In: News
• By: John
• January 29th, 2009

It’s clear from developments over the last few months, and even the last couple of days, that the current economic climate is one few of us, even those old enough to experienced the dot com bust of a few years ago have any great experience of.

There’s certainly plenty of cause not to be optimistic. But of course, economies are as much about confidence as just about anything else. So, in all the gloom, is there cause for optimism?

I think we in the web probably have more cause than most, strange as it may seem. And I genuinely believe that we have the opportunity to show leadership - by innovating, by redoubling our efforts to help the web become even more of the world changing force it has become.

In practical terms, things that excite me, and give me cause for optimism (and of course things we are focussing on at the conference) include

the mobile web - think of the impact that the web has had on the world, economically, socially, politically, when it has essentially to date only been available within narrow constraints of time (work and school hours for most people for most of its history), and place (workplaces, studies, places of education). So, as first class web experiences become increasingly available in all our pockets over the next few years, imagine the implications for business, education, and just about every aspect of human endeavor. Imagine the opportunities having the web everywhere all the time opens up. At Web Directions we have several sessions and workshops focussing on just these issues and opportunities.

geo location services and apis - closely couple with this is a new range of capabilities already available, which will become increasingly standardized - the ability for a web application to ask a browser where the user is, and contextualize services and information based on that. We’ve got a session by Ryan Sarver one of the leading experts in this field at Web Directions focussing on precisely this. We’re also working with the excellent folks at BrightKite to give you first hand experience of how some of these services can be used right now in your own applications.

offline applications - there are places and times we still can’t use the web, whether it’s on an airplane, in a remote location, or when we forget to pay our ISP bill :-) But in order to make web based applications really something we can rely on, they must have 100% uptime. The capacity to have browser based applications that work whether you are offline or on is a vital step toward making the web the fundamental platform for computing. The last year or two have seen huge steps in making this a reality, and one of the genuine pioneers in this field, first with Dojo, and now with Google Gears, is Brad Neuberg, who’s running Beyond Cookies a session on how to make your web applications work offline as well as on (all the while inside the browser).

desktop like applications in the browser - The web has for most of its history been primarily document oriented. We’ve been seeing its transformation to an application oriented platform these last few years, but this has really accelerated with the rise of sophisticated libraries and frameworks that provide much of the underlying functionality required for web applications. To take this to the next step, only a week or two ago, Palm announced their new webOS and Mojo application development framework, based on HTML, JavaScript and CSS. The core tools of the web will be the core tools for how you build applications for webOS and the new generation of Palm devices - to me an exciting and courageous step by Palm. At Web Directions North, we have several sessions devoted to this whole area of innovation - including a workshop by one of the developers of the exciting Cappucino web application development framework, and a double session featuring core members of the teams that are developing such important widely used libraries as Dojo, YUI, Cappuccino and JQuery.

There’s actually a lot more happening with the web, and at Web Directions that excites me, and gives me cause for great optimism - from HTML5 and innovations in CSS, to new ways of interacting with the web using devices like the Wii, surface and multi touch mobile devices.

So, while Denver isn’t Davos, I honestly believe it’s the folks on the web, innovating, not the folks at think tanks bloviating that are really a key to turning the economy worldwide around.

Are you optimistic? What makes you so?

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