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Future of Web Dev and the Perfect Skill Set

By David Golding | Print This Post

As Microsoft tries to patch up its mutt of a web browser, some questions remain about the Internet Explorer behemoth and what may come of other technologies raising the ante on what’s possible with the web. I’m fairly convinced that with time, IE will be dethroned, thanks to open source projects like Firefox and WebKit. With Google Chrome entering the foray with WebKit as its rendering engine, it’s only a matter of time before IE will get pushed aside by the developers out there. And the rise of the iPhone… like Cameron Moll has been saying, the future of web dev is in mobile devices. How might a shift in the internet market further push IE to the side?

I only focus on IE because it’s really the only thing I see as holding back the progress of web technology. Across the board, it’s inferior in terms of the technical aspects of making things possible. Its JavaScript processing is terrible, it’s XHTML isn’t up to speed (it’s best to stick with XHTML 1.0 Transitional… wha? “Transitional” means not permanent, yet IE seems content to encourage holding to outdated methods), and I don’t even want to start in on how it handles CSS. To me, IE is the bottleneck.

However, this fact doesn’t seem to be slowing down real innovators out there. We’ve seen a rise in frameworks-based solutions in the last couple of years, until at this moment, some incredibly useful options exist for almost every major programming platform. In many ways, the days of writing individual scripts and classes are over.

Where I’m most impressed with what folks have been creating for web developers is with Cappuccino and SproutCore. These two projects work to abstract the JavaScript/AJAX aspect of web applications. Cappuccino appears to do a better job of abstracting entirely any JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, so all you have to do is immerse yourself in Objective-J and you’ve got yourself a stylish web app. If you want to be wowed, just go and see 280 Slides: a fully web-based Keynote-esque application. The whole thing was done in Cappuccino and (I’m fairly sure) Rails.

With the advent of such robust JavaScript frameworks, the web browser has all of a sudden become a bridge rather than a browser. The early “web-based OS” projects, I initially thought, seemed redundant and a little excessive (why build a web-based OS if, to access it, another OS must necessarily be running?). And I still hold to that opinion, though I do believe Cappuccino and SproutCore are moving in the right direction. They serve more like web application and UI frameworks, much like Cocoa on MacOS. You still need to know your programming language (Objective-C, C++, Java, or Python), but how the language interacts with the UI gets abstracted wonderfully, saving time and improving the user experience at the same time.

So, I suppose my rant here is simply to encourage developers to learn these new technologies and to use them well. I, for one, am excited about open source taking over web development. It at least helps to move us beyond waiting for the big companies to get it right. And the limits of our skills get pushed out as well.

My idea of the perfect skill set for web devs? (Just for fun :)