The first Internet pages were nothing but letters and numbers with no user interaction. All you could do was to get information. Along the way this evolved and then you could send some information like comments and small uploads via browser. Now you can have dynamic pages and AJAX applications. What will be the near future like?
Nothing ever made progress so fast like the Internet world. With a growth rate of more than one billion new pages a day, this little digital world, which is very little physically but huge in terms of information and media and data real promises to change the way we access to information and the way we deal with it. Cloud computing and online operating systems will decide how the computer of tomorrow will be.
The best thing you can do today is to work in real time with many people on the same page. Thanks to advanced AJAX you can send and receive web data in real time with no need to refresh the page. This has the cost of using a lot of processing power in the server but also has the advantage of having always the latest information in your screen as well as all your data always synchronized with all the users you want to. If you want to make a long group work today, there is nothing better than Google Docs just to give you an example. All data is shared with all the users and each one will work on his part. This is one of the best examples today of online group work.
This kind of information exchange has still some limitations. It is still too slow to be really useful and when the connection is lost, you can no longer work and this happens frequently.
In the near future you will no longer have to refresh pages like you do today. Each page will be the entire internet and just like you just go from one room to another, you will be able to get more data and to clear the old one, instead of opening a new webpage. This has the advantage of using less client memory and less processing power too, with the disadvantage of making web surfing a little harder. With everything just in one single page, it’s not a unique URL per page anymore. You really have to change the way you think online.
Just like today you have virtual folders instead of real folders, where you get the fetched data from the “real” folders and this way speed up the way you access to information, one single webpage will get data from the data bases based on the links you use and also based on the search queries you make.
Take a look at Facebook. Unlike Myspace where you go to a new URL and this process is terribly slow, you get data directly from the database to that very same page, much like you just open another window in the same program. This kind of internet design made Facebook the number one social website in the world.
Just imagine it for a second. When you click on a link, you do not go to another page, instead you just get the new information to the screen, just like you get new emails on Gmail. You do not get new screens, you get erased information and new information after that.
If you are a webmaster you can forget about traditional ways of making pages.
From now on you will have to work just with databases and search queries.
The future will be Gmail based and Facebook based.
Tue, Jul 7, 2009, by Redburn
Web Talk