Jeff Haynie gave a whirlwind history of the browser this morning at the 5th International AJAXWorld Conference & Expo in New York City, with a view to showing how the way we build applications has evolved over the years of Web 1.0 and now moving into Web 2.0. He covered the rise of Java, the demise of applets, and the slow, slow progress of HTML 5.0, now 11 years in the making and still not there. But most of the innovation, Haynie contends, has been on the server.



In the packed Grand Ballroom of New York City's historic Roosevelt Hotel, Haynie's history embraced the arrival of C# and .NET on the scene, and then the rise of JBoss - for whom he formerly worked, which again - he argued - was driven by server-side architecture. The apps, though, weren't really much different from how they'd been in 1999.

Even the advent of services-orientation. Haynie said, didn't really alter very much. Apps remained more or less the same.

"We're stuck in Web 1.5, not quite 1.0 and not yet 2.0," said Haynie. It's a world of MVC + AJAX, he explained.

But Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google and the Web 2.0 startups are really starting to drive innovation, Haynie noted. "We're starting to think about applications again."

Software's moving to the open source model, driving costs down; pretty much everybody's connecting to the Web; consideration is again being given to User eXperience (UX). What is starting to happen is that companies are at last starting to think about how richer apps look, feel, and perform.

Haynie described how when Flickr first came out he was "mind-boggled" by how much it could do in the browser, and Google Maps ditto. Kayak used AJAX too, to impressive effect.

Now what big enterprises want is this same kind of functionality.

There are a lot of competing ideas about how to do it best, Haynie noted. "Sun's JavaFX, Microsoft too is doing something big with Silverlight, Adobe is leveraging Flash's huge installation base with Flex."

Web 2.0, so Haynie is concerned, is about rich applications. But does that mean mountains of JavaScript?

Open standards and open source can come to the rescue, Haynie says.  There's a lot of innovation, libraries and frameworks. But how do we keep up with them all?

"Open Source 2.0" can help produce an integrated RIA programming model.

He then demonstrated Web Expression Language ("very simple to program"), which helps developers code JavaScript without them having to worry about the security shortcomings of JS.

RIA developers can create new widgets, Hayne emphasized, and they can leverage all of the great existing widgets. What Appcelerator does is help them leverage them all.

"You can create services in any common language - Java Ruby PHP, .NET, Python and Perl," Haynie said.