The Evolution of the Web: How Application Development Changed as a Result.
The Web is a growing universe of web pages and web applications that consist of videos, photos, and interactive content. What the average user does not see are the underlying web technologies, browsers, and the evolution of the web that has made everything possible. Web technologies have developed over time creating new experiences for users causing a high demand for it.
First things first, there is often a common misconception that the WWW and the Internet are the same things. However, that is not the case. The Web or World Wide Web is a collection of information accessed through the Internet while the Internet is a global network of networks. In simpler terms, the internet is the infrastructure while the Web is the service on top of it.
The Web was initially introduced by Tim Burners-Lee, the director of the World Wide Web Consortium in the late 1980’s. There are three phases of the Web which were born and initiated from his views.
- Web 1.0 or the Web of documents.
- Web 2.0 or the Web of the people
- Web 3.0 or the Web of data.
Evolution of the Web.
- Web 1.0
The first version of the Web 1.0 invented by Tim Burners-Lee lasted a decade from 1990. This era of the web was identified as the “read-only web”. The user could only search and read on any content provided by the content producers. There was almost zero user interaction as all of the websites were either static or personal. This was the requirement of websites back in the days. The owners required to make their information available for anyone for reference. There was no active communication or any information exchange from the consumer to the producer of the information.
The core web protocols that were used in Web 1.0 are HTML, HTTP, and URI. Some of the newer protocols such as XML, XHTML, and CSS were used too. Both client and server-side scripting were used in Web 1.0. Technologies like ASP, PHP, JSP, CGI, and PERL were used for server-side scripting while JavaScript, VBScript, and Flash were used for client-side scripting.
The main downfall concerning Web 1.0 was the lack of interaction between the client and the producer of information. It did not support two-way communication and was solely based on client initiation. It was also slow and had a chunky nature to it. Every time new information was entered into the web pages, it required a refresh.
One of the biggest incorrect ideas behind Web 1.0 was the ignorance of network effects. The reason being the ratio between writers to readers was less which caused the network to be slow. Slow networks ensured that some users had no access to web resources. These shortcomings called out for a newer version of the web, which came out as web 2.0.
- Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is referred to as the Social web or the “read-write web” by Dale Dougherty. It facilitates the interaction between web users and sites which was not limited to read-only but also to write, modify, and update content. Communication among users, collaboration, and participation in distributed activities was also facilitated thus bridging gaps that were seen in Web 1.0. This resulted in making web transactions bi-directional. Web 2.0 was so much more than a new version of Web 1.0. It had flexible web design, creative reuse, updates, content creation, and modification through collaboration.
These changes brought in a rather dramatic change in the landscape of the web. For example, websites like YouTube, MySpace which completely rely on submissions from users around the globe and other websites such as Facebook, Twitter which rely on both user interactions and contributions came into being.
There is a perception that if a certain website is developed using a certain technology that it falls under the web 2.0. However, that is not the case. The principle concept of Web 2.0 is simply giving users the option of contributing content and interacting. The web technologies used frequently include HTML5, CSS3, and several JavaScript frameworks like ReactJs, AngularJs, VueJs, etc.
With these rapid developments in the Web, to cater to the needs of users at large there were visible limitations and potential for more improvement. Ethical issues have always been a high priority concern. Connectivity and knowledge sharing among platforms were still very limited. These concerns gave rise to Web 3.0.
- Web 3.0
Web 3.0 was devised by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006. It is also identified as the “executable web”. It has always been challenging to put forward one answer or definition to the question, ‘what is web 3.0?’ as experts have several opinions and approaches on this. A majority of the IT experts consider web 3.0 as semantic web. The concept of data owning has disappeared and it has inclined towards data sharing.
Services may show different views for the same data for different users focusing on personalized context. These services can vary from browsers to virtual worlds to various devices. The goal behind web 3.0 is to define structured data to link and integrate them into a more effective manner allowing reuse across applications, data management, support mobile internet accessibility, enable organized collaboration, and most importantly enhance customer satisfaction.
Social networking has been a core part of society and plays a huge role in the community as a platform to share thoughts, ideas instead of using the web to just link documents. The social web connects people from around the globe making the world smaller. The semantic web is an extension of the web 3.0 that gives people the ability to find information in a much deeper level in terms of search terms and context.
The information structure has changed in a way to ensure the production of both human and machine-readable content. Web 3D allows people to live in a virtual world where interaction is at its highest level as a group or individually. According to the media-centric web approach, search engines can take media inputs such as audio, video, and images and search for similar results.
Some of the key elements of web 3.0 are the social web, the semantic web, web 3D, and the media-centric web These are in fact what contributes for web 3.0 to step into a whole different and new level.
How Application Development Changed.
With the evolution of the web from mere static web pages to the executable web stage, web application development too has changed rapidly to cater to the constant requirements and improvements that change rapidly with the technological advancement, especially in the business world. More applications have migrated to web-based technologies, rather than relying on native desktop applications. Development standards and expectations are changing with the emerging of new tools and libraries. The evolution of the web has had the biggest impact on the business world as it heavily depends on applications.
Hardware devices
Over the past few years, we have seen how much the devices have evolved and how it plays a significant role in the consumer and business world. Hardware devices were limited to mobile phones and personal computers, but going forward the trend seems to be expanding exponentially. The world is going through a wave of “smart” devices like watches, glasses, TVs and so much more. This has led to the growth of responsive design. Web developers must now adapt and change the applications to support all screen sizes, resolutions, and interfaces.
Another important aspect when developing web applications for a range of hardware devices is speed. The processing power and memory of a desktop are different to that of smartphones and tablets. One important factor to be considered during the comparison between speeds is the CPU architecture because the phone and a laptop run on completely two different processors. Therefore, comparing the two is tedious as they work differently. However, it’s agreed that phones are better at doing small tasks such as loading a web page done much faster compared to PCs, whereas PCs excel at getting the bigger tasks done much faster. So, the developer would have to change his code to cater to different processing and memory powers to give the best page load time possible on any device.
An important adaptation in web development is the touch screen functionality. There are very few “mouse over” actions as almost every device nowadays supports the touch screen functionality. A developer must organize and structure the User Interface in such a way that a user would know where to touch on the screen to fire up actions.
Security
With the improvements in usability and interfaces, another important factor that has to be considered is security. However, with everything else being developed on the hyperdrive, security development has been done on a much slower phase. A recent study revealed that 96% of all web applications contain at least one serious security vulnerability. As we step into new improvements, it is important to focus on making sure that applications are developed with proper security standards and it should be made into one of the top priorities as far as development is concerned.
“Cyber-attacks are increasing in number and sophistication. The ramifications of failing to protect from those attacks to the developers of these applications is great financial hardship which will just become worse as the scale continues to grow. This will force developers to rethink the practices they believe are giving them speed but instead are leaving wide open barn doors for the pirates to walk in.” — Alan Willett, President at Oxseeker Inc.
Web Development Tools
Web development is becoming more complex by the day which requires more tools and skills that require an understanding of the architecture, security, databases, front end design, etc. As a result, there is a greater emphasis on learning and understanding new libraries, frameworks, and tools which have emerged rapidly in the past few years that not only improve productivity but also fills in the skill gaps of developers. In fact, according to Skyler Slade, who is the Co-founder and CTO of Tandem states that web development tooling, to make the job of a web developer easier, was ignored for a long time. With the increase of web developers, there has been a lot of focus on building tools to automate a lot of manual work.
User Experience
With the advancement of mobile applications, user expectations of the User Interface have now changed. Developers who do not start with a good UI design and an even better user experience concept or who do not provide simple and intuitive interfaces will have to face certain ramifications with the competition.
Web applications that behave traditionally are being pushed out very fast and users are moving towards more powerful web applications that require notables shifts in development methods. This means the shift from the server-side to the client-side development. As browsers became more powerful, the traditional server-side is now shifting towards the client-side. The interfaces are moving towards rich interactive UIs using frameworks such as Angular.js. Due to the usage of faster JS engines such as Chrome’s V8 and frameworks, processing that would be usually done in the backend could be handled directly in the browser itself. This enables certain processes such as data analysis and visualization to be done in real-time.
Real-time applications
Another evolving and important trend in web application development is the concept of real-time web apps. These are web apps that can communicate and update the application without requiring a page refresh. The trend of real-time apps opens up some great possibilities and will be improved very much over the years.
“Building real-time applications used to be quite difficult, now, with Node.js and Socket.io, building real time apps has been simplified by an order of magnitude. This is great for instant messaging, chat, real-time document collaboration and editing, real-time analytics, and a number of other apps.” — Calkins
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is the delivery of on-demand computer system resources mainly focussing on data storage and computing power without active, direct management from the user. Companies can rent anything from applications to storage from a cloud service provider. One of the main advantages is that companies can lower the cost and complexity of owning and maintaining their own IT infrastructure and pay if the services have been used.
Cloud computing can be divided into three computing models.
- Iaas or Infrastructure-as-a-Service
Includes the fundamental blocks of computing that can be rented which include physical or virtual servers, storage, and networking - PaaS or Platform-as-a-Service
It provides a platform for users to develop, run, and manage applications without having to deal with the complexity of building and maintaining infrastructure concerning development and deployment. - SaaS or Software-as-a-Service
A delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis.
The usage of cloud services by companies for projects gives them the ability to prevent upfront costs during development and testing as they have to pay for the resources they consume. The ability to create new services with less time and effort compared to the traditional methods helps a lot as far as the development time is concerned.
The concept of SaaS is embraced more and more by businesses to address their specific needs. In the past, businesses ran their software in-house but follow SaaS for more business-specific needs. One web application may use different APIs for the different services they provide. API-centric web applications are getting way more attention since they render faster web application development. Many companies use the SaaS model to offer applications through the cloud. Salesforce is the best example of this.
Final Thoughts
To sum up, there have been many major developments in web applications since 1989 and it does not look like this progress would slow down or stop in the future. The developments and breakthroughs in Web will force web application to change in order to keep up. It started with just static web pages but now Web development is heading towards using Artificial Intelligence for all interactions, which has led to the birth of the newest version of the Web.
Web 4.0 is considered as an ultra-intelligent electronic agent. With the massive breakthroughs and advancements in nanotechnology, controlled interfaces, and progress in the development of telecommunication, soon enough a machine would be clever enough to be doing everything a user would do; reading information on the web, react to the content by executing actions, deciding which action to perform first and so on.
Constant connectivity is expected in Web 4.0 which will affect many sectors in our life. It will create a symbiotic relationship between humans and machines. This new wave of the web will also create the future in both business and the medical fields. The usage of RFID(Radio Frequency Identification) tags will create a symbiotic relationship between machines as well. As we can see, we are heading through major changes in the future which will change everything in the near future.
