Microsoft, founder, organizer and social chair of the Desktop First Foundation, now sees through their own well trenched oppositions and admits that maybe, possibly it makes some sense for some applications to simple live out on the internet. They now join Google, Yahoo, Apple, Salesforce.com, NetSuite, ZoHo, Meebo, Zimbra, as well as an uncountable number of neuvo-funded startups who have banked on the internet as the universal delivery platform for the future.
Oh, also, Google and Amazon agree that users get antsy when they have to wait more than half a second for their application to respond, affecting customer satisfaction and repeat usage. Google’s VP Marissa Mayer recounted having experienced a 20% drop in usage for results delivered as little as .5 seconds slower than typical.
Possibly not for the first time, your customers are demanding the convenience and portability of online web applications while still clinging to expectations that web applications should consistently respond as fast as desktop applications. An immovable object just shook hands with an irresistible force.
The problem with web applications, frankly, is the web. Months of tuning web code can save seconds in application speed only to be lost in the network through slow routing, lost packets, or bandwidth throttling. This is the impossibility of speed on the internet. You have very little control out there.
To keep up with our need for speed, we will have to move more and more interface code off the server and onto the desktop’s browser in the form of Javascript. Google’s chrome team seems to agree, focusing their performance efforts for web apps on a high speed Javascript engine. SproutCore, famous for running Apple’s MobileMe web platform, is a fully modeled MVC framework in Javascript perfectly suited for this kind of application. Servers could begin to revert back to simply offering data storage. Instead of pageviews, we may soon be tracking information requests. An online ad industry addicted to clicks and impressions may have to get back on the wagon and find a whole new model (they’re so agile). This could be interesting.
I’ll just suggest this to any kid starting out the web development world: Learn JavaScript
Photo attributed to pctalbot @ Flickr CC