Great Time To Be a Web Programmer

If you don't know client-side Web programming (HTML, CSS, and Javascript) already, it should be the next technology you learn! I'm pretty sure that 2009 starts the golden era of these technologies, and this post explains why. Asides from making my point, I highlight some cool and very useful pieces of technology along the way.

Overview
My argument goes along the following lines: Javascript has evolved into a mature language, with good frameworks. Browsers got faster at Javascript, and better at standard compliance. Major Web sites offer easy access to their data through APIs. Applications and widgets based on Web technologies can be easily integrated into the desktop, or other Web applications. Last, but definitely not least, generous free hosting is available, and can be set up quickly.

Read on, and find out what technologies I'm referring to.

The Platform Is Ready
Javascript got off to a really bad start. Starting from the language's name itself, and continuing with the horribly slow and buggy browser implementations, Javascript got a bad reputation.

However, today's Javascript is a well-understood and pretty productive language. Libraries like Dojo, Prototype/scriptaculous, and jQuery abstract browser incompatibilities away, and insulate programmers from the less inspired DOM APIs. The HTML5 draft, which is adopted pretty quickly (compared to the time it took to get CSS2 in) by the leading quality browsers, specs out many goodies, such as offline Web applications, push notifications, and better graphics.

Equally important, browsers are in a Javascript speed race, and the winners are us. Between Safari 4, Google Chrome, and Firefox 3.1, we should have fast Javascript execution on all major operating systems before the end of 2009.

Integration Opportunities Abound
Integration comes in two flavors. First, you might want to use data from other sources, like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Second, your idea may not be suitable for an entire Web application, and might fare better on the desktop, or as a widget. There are great news coming from both fronts.

JSONP is an easy way to get data, despite the cross-domain restriction policy, and major companies have been taking it seriously. Google's search API and Twitter's API have JSONP support. Yahoo's Query Language goes one step further and lets you get other sites' content wrapped up in nice JSONP. Did I mention Dojo's seamless support for Google's search API?
If you want to integrate your application with your user's desktop, you have Google Gears and Mozilla Prism today, and HTML5 in the future.

Applications that don't need a lot of screen space can be packged effectively as widgets. Widgets are supported natively in Mac OS by Dashboard, and in Vista's Sidebar. For a more cross-platform solution, you should check out Google Gadgets, which work the same on the Web, in the Mac OS dashboard , in Linux, and in Windows.

Oh, and one more thing. Google's gadgets also work in their productivity suite - in Gmail, in Spreadsheets, and in Google Sites. So you could impress your boss by building a dashboard with important numbers straight into their Gmail.

REST Decouples Client From Server
Remember ugly long URLs? REST (Representational State Transfer) is a collection of design principles which yields the opposite of those long URLs. It matters because, once your client-server API obeys REST, your client is not dependent on your server implementation.

Using REST works out very well with the approach of pushing most of the application logic to the client-side Javascript code. An argument for why most of your code should be client-side follows.

If you're looking for free hosting (covered in the next section), the server code will not be in Javascript, but rather a server-side language, like Ruby, Python, or Java. Choosing a server language narrows down your platform choice (for example, at the moment, Google's App Engine only works with Python). If you're looking for free hosting, you want to be able to port your code quickly to whichever platform offers better free quotas at the moment.

Using REST designs with JSON input and output gives you "standardized" servers that are easy to interact with, and easy to code. On the client side, for example, Dojo automates the data exchange for you. On the server side, Rails scaffolds have built-in REST/JSON support, or you can pick up ready-made App Engine code.

Hosting Can Be Free
Web applications are very easy to access, but the servers are a pain to setup. Furthermore, hosting costs money - even if you're on Amazon EC2, there's a non-zero amount of money that you have to pay. Most of us, programmers, don't like to pay for stuff.

Fortunately, there's the Google App Engine, and it has a free tier which is pretty much equivalent to running your own server. "Pretty much" covers everything except storage, which is currently capped at 1Gb.

If you prefer gems to snakes, like me, check out Heroku for Rails hosting. Heroku's beta platform is free, and they promised a free tier on their production version. Their free tier may not end up to be as generous as Google's, but you can always downgrade to Python if your application becomes successful. Update: Google's App Engine can run Java now, which leads to support for Ruby and other languages. This post has more details.

Conclusion
I hope I have convinced you to make a priority from learning HTML, CSS, and Javascript this year. If not, here's "one more thing" - you can build hosted solutions for small companies (50 people or less) with zero infrastructure cost. Google Apps, together with the App Engine gives you SSO (single sign-on), and Gadgets can be used to integrate into Gmail.

Thanks for reading this far, and I hope you have found this post to be helpful!