Web Applications

May 2004

Jim Ley - Scalable Web Services Ltd.

Introduction

The html/CGI/script web application environment has been very successful at providing interfaces to applications and services. This platform is limited in a number of ways, security, client pull, document centric API's, limited form interaction.

What do web applications need?

What new can be done to achieve a prime environment for Web Applications?

What could a standard deliver?

Summary

Work to standardise and extend what is currently provided by the Window object of common web user agents would be very valuable, it would require a considerable amount of security related work.

Investigation into declarative web application work would not be particularly valuable as declarative mechanisms do not have sufficient error handling ability to cope with the wide variety of environments that a web application would be exposed to without basically becoming a script language in itself, which is not useful when well known languages are available for the job.