Today, I spent the day listening to Philip Greenspun’s view of what the world of web-based applications should look like, where he thinks it is going, and what we, as developers should do about it.
He had many interesting things to say, especially with respect to managing data through the use of solid RDBM systems. I spent some time reading his book on web publishing
, and I tend to agree with his points. The biggest are scaleablity and infrastructure quality.
The other fun thing was that they gave out awards to many students, two who were 13 years old, for creating interesting non-commercial web applications. The finalists for this year created some fantastic apps. This is a great test-bed for cultivating new students and development ideas. Some past winners have created lots of their stock applications. Their free services include a reminder system, a web-based presentation system, and an uptime monitor that is reminiscent of what Dave Winer created in dealing with his ISP troubles this year.
All in all, this was a great presentation. I’m going back tomorrow morning for a day of looking at their tool set. They have a large system built on top of AOLServer and Oracle using Tcl as the glue language. AOLServer has a built in Tcl interperter, so it acts much like Apache with mod_perl. Philip describes the speed gain over traditional CGI’s as a factor or 100.
