Tim Bray On the Future of the Web

snitch writes "In a recent interview at QCon SF 2008, Tim Bray talks about why he is not convinced with the buzz surrounding Rich Internet Applications and shares his ideas on Cloud Computing. He also expresses his opinion regarding the debate REST vs. WS-* and the future directions web technologies will be taking. Bray also addresses the way web technologies are affected by the current economic turmoil and gives his insight into which paradigms he sees going forward in these challenging times."

Comments

I think he has some good points.

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What he says about RIA might be controversial but there is some validity to what he says. There is a lot to be said for simplicity of interface and richness of content. That has been the hallmark of most great websites.

That's not to say user interfaces couldn't be improved on the web through technologies such as AJAX, but I feel it should be used more as a condiment rather than the main course.

I remember back in the 90's people kept saying "push" technologies will be the next big thing but that didn't seem to be the case.

By the way, there was a cool presentation of the Sun Cloud at CommunityOne last week. It's pretty neat. I think that cloud computing should still abstract scaling from the user, but that may never happen or will take a lot longer to implement.

Right now it's just like drawing a network diagram in Visio, except the symbols in your drawing represent actual virtual servers in the Sun Cloud. It's pretty neat. It will be interesting to see what the pricing will be like. They say they are planning on being price competitive with other platforms, which should mean it should be similar with Amazon's EC2???