Tuesday, July 05, 2005

Introduction

Welcome to the World Wide Web portion of myself.

I'm a long-time software developer and computer scientist with a fascination for information-processing tools and the ways computers can change the way we work and live. Since the end of the dot-com bubble, like a lot of other people I see a revolution happening in the ways people receive information about their world, communicate and interact with each other, where digitally-supported social networking is becoming one of the most important means of communication among people, and where the line between digital social networking and publishing is vanishing.

In my own smaller and more specialized part of the digital world, true interactivity has started to reach the Web. There is a realization that Web-based software applications are not limited to just looking nice; they can also act nice. Interacting with a Web server no longer is no longer the digital counterpart of communicating with a clerk by passing a form through a slot and having it handed back with red marks on it. In the new generation of Web applications the user can have a digital conversation with a Web page where server-based intelligence can apply at any time.

Web pages become like control panels where user activity can affect the outside world at whatever interval is appropriate to the application. This new kind of interactivity is now going by the name of Ajax, and this blog is about what interests me about what is happening in the development of that world.

Tools for building software has been a particular interest for me for many years. I have always tended to feel deep inside, that where software is concerned, if you can really imagine it, you can build it, and that there are not good long-term reasons why there should be a big gap between clear imagination of software and the building of that software. This vision has been gradually happening, and through the Web more than anywhere. It isn't going to become suddenly complete, but it powers my imagination.

My hopes for this blog are that it will reflect some points of view about the Web, Ajax applications, and Web application development; and that it will be of interest to some people.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home