A Short History of Web Applications | 3- Provide powerful and extensible object models for inter-
activity. - Enable rapid application development through compo-
nents and reuse. - Enable the use of web and data services provided by
application servers. - Embrace connected and disconnected clients.
- Enable easy deployment on multiple platforms and
devices.
This movement toward providing richer, more desktop-like
application experiences in the browser (enabled by the Flash
Player runtime, and more recently by Ajax) has led to an
explosion of web applications.
Today the web has firmly established itself as an application
deployment platform that offers benefits to both developers
and end users. Some of these benefits include the ability to:
- Target multiple platforms and operating systems.
- Develop with relatively high-level programming and lay-
out languages. - Allow end users to access their applications and data
from virtually any Internet-connected computer. - Easily push application updates to users.
The growth of web applications can be seen in both the Web
2.0 movement, which consists almost entirely of web based
applications and APIs, as well as the adoption of web appli-
cations as a core business model by major companies and
organizations.