http://www.infoq.com/interviews/tim-bray-future-of-web#

Tim Bray comments on the importance of Ajax, JavaScript, agile development methodologies, REST, open source, and cloud computing.

In case you’re not familiar with his work “Tim Bray launched one of the first public web search engines in ‘95, co-invented XML 1.0, co-edited “Namespaces in XML”, served on the W3C Technical Architecture Group, and co-chaired the IETF AtomPub Working Group. Currently, he serves as a Distinguished Engineer and Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems”

Here are some of his quotes from the article.

“Ajax is getting awfully good in particular with the advances that are being made in the browser technology with the increased compatibility between things like Firefox and Safari and so on and the new canvas element and the fact that the new browsers have these fantastically high performance JavaScript engines in them. I suspect that the gap in the ecosystem that lies between what you could achieve with Ajax and what you need something like Flash or JavaFX or Silverlight to achieve it’s not that big enough to be terribly interesting.”

“… from the business point of view we are going to see that a lot of traditional application planning a deployment cycles are simply going to be broken. The notion that you can use the waterfall model to spec out a project and start by buying Oracle licenses and hardware servers for seven figures and plan for deployment fourteen months from now, the senior VP isn’t going to sign off on that anymore. They are worried about getting over the next six weeks and not about the next fourteen months.

I think that this is probably a very powerful force, in favor of things like Agile methods and Open Source Software and the Cloud all the things that are both monetization on the point of value. Technologies that are going to succeed in a tough times are going to be the ones that are free to adopt, and cheap to deploy and then when they actually start to go to production that’s when you are willing to pay some real money for them, because you saw. So I think that moves us from services and support business model to big up front license and cost business model from deployment to the cloud as opposed to deployment into privately held servers. I think that it is easy to see a bunch of existing technologies, that are going to be encouraged and promoted like Agile like Cloud, like Open Source.”

“On the client, JavaScript is really going through a golden age JQuery is very very good, presumably the ease which you can achieve JavaScript effects without having to sweat too much about different kinds of browsers will continue to increase and get better”

“…it’s pretty clear that at the moment REST is the horse that most people are betting on.”

“I see very few instances of interesting new WS-* stuff being stood up. And I would think that as we move in a more service oriented and web oriented direction, increasing the interesting services are going to be RESTful. Kinds of services and the pressure to integrate with and use those will push things in the right direction.

Even Microsoft which was clearly the leader or co-leader with IBM with WS-* movement, in the next generation of WCF everything is starting to look a whole lot more RESTful and Microsoft Azure has built around AtomPub in large parts. The vendors are pulling and pushing and the services are pulling and pushing. So I think the movement will happen fairly organically.”