Page #93 (Chapter 14 - Whats Next?)

	Chapter 14 - What’s Next?
	Visual Basic Developers Guide to ASP and IIS
	A. Russell Jones

Copyright 1999 SYBEX Inc.

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	Where Are Web Applications Headed?

	I believe that Web applications are likely to become the dominant form of business applications within the next few years. Although the bulk of program development still occurs for stand-alone and standard client-server applications, Web applications have too many business advantages to ignore. From the point of view of a business, Web applications:

	Centralize administration and security  All the application code, settings, and data reside on centralized servers. Administrators can control and monitor access, solve problems, and perform maintenance without visiting each desktop.

	Lend themselves well to monitoring  That's a scary thought, but it's also a huge advantage to a business to know how much use an application receives and to know who is using it. Without such monitoring, it's difficult to tell whether a program justifies its cost.

	Upgrade easily  Easily, that is, as compared to upgrading 20,000 desktops. Not only that, but when you upgrade a Web application, you also upgrade all users—simultaneously, which provides tremendous cost savings.

	Provide control over sensitive data  Not perfect control—people can print files from their browsers (although maybe not for long). But at least administrators have a centralized backup for all the information—no more critical Excel files lost during the weekend vacation.

	Scale as needed  Employees come and go at businesses. Not all businesses have this problem, but consider a company that provides seasonal employment—tax consultants, for example. During the early part of the year, these companies may swell the employee ranks by several thousand percent. Think of the software costs. If you purchase shrink-wrapped, stand-alone software, you must amortize the cost over a full year—even if you use it only part-time. Software rentals, per-use fees, and timed rentals are inevitable as software becomes centralized. Just as it is easier to upgrade a centralized application, it's also easier to increase the number of users of that application, and for the same reasons.

	Provide global access  Businesses can provide secure global access to centrally maintained and administered applications.

	If only businesses benefited from Web applications, building critical mass would take a long time; but Web applications also provide features that developers like. Developers have traditionally had to work hard to create applications that use data from multiple file formats, have interfaces that adjust to different screen resolutions, and run on widely varying types of equipment. Such applications are now commonplace because of the Web. Incompatible file formats, varying screen resolutions, incompatible equipment—we've all struggled with those issues over the years. These problems haven't gone away, but the Web has ameliorated them. Consider these features; if you've been programming a while, remember how (or if) you used to have to code to provide them:

	Fonts, colors, and graphics  Sure, they've been available since DOS and they got easier with Windows, but HTML made creating functional and attractive information displays so easy that you don't even need a programmer to create them anymore. Anyone with Word, FrontPage, or any of a few dozen What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editors can format complex displays, including input controls, with less than a day's training.

	Databases  Databases used to be a "roll-your-own" affair. DBase and, later, Access gave programmers easy-to-use database power. SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, and others provided enterprise-level scalability. Today, a great deal of database code (SQL) is portable between many databases. I fully expect eXtensible Query Language (XQL) or a similar syntax to extend that portability to all databases.

	File formats  The world is moving toward universal file formats. The needs of businesses and governments to store information in ways that are portable—not just from one program version to another, but between all programs— are driving this change. You've already seen display code move from binary form (custom code) to text form (HTML). Just a few years ago, graphics file formats—and their incompatibilities—were a major development issue. When was the last time you worked with anything except .gif and .jpg files? Even the .bmp format, Windows' native graphics format, has become secondary to the popular Web graphics formats. Word processing software, spreadsheets, and even databases are just one step behind. With the release of Office 2000, Microsoft puts the world on notice that eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has become the file format for the future.

	Programming languages  The choices for programming languages are shrinking rapidly. It's not that there are fewer languages available—there are more; but the number of people who are adept at all but the most popular languages is shrinking because businesses want to use standards. The process feeds on itself. As more businesses standardize on VB, C, and Java, more programmers abandon other languages, such as COBOL and Delphi, to concentrate on those with which they can earn a living. I think this process is far from over. Either the result will be a language that (like XML) has a consistent and extensible syntax, or the various languages will become front ends for a common back-end syntax (which, in a sense, they are already). Perhaps that will be XML; I don't know.

	Multiuser applications  You used to write custom code to monitor and control multiuser access to files and applications. Now multiuser capabilities are built into every Web server and database server. Scalability is still an important issue, but building scaleable applications is easier than it has ever been before. In the future, as processing becomes increasingly distributed and distributable, scalability issues will become nothing more than cost issues.

	Some of the advantages are the same for programmers as for businesses: one (or at least few) copies of the application to maintain, upgrade, and support. Global access means you can create, deploy, and have people using your application within an extremely short time. Although WebClasses themselves won't be a final step in the migration of applications to the Web, the time you spend learning about them won't be wasted. The effort you spend learning the art and craft of building Web applications now will put you in a position to lead in the future.