What is the ‘modern web’ or ‘Web 3.0’?
Modern web applications, also referred to as ‘Web 3.0‘, bring together two worlds which enable the holy grail of highly responsive, cloud-based applications. These are:
- Cloud-deployed, no-install, automatic-upgrade applications (which we’ve all come to absolutely LOVE) where the applications run from the cloud (like GMail) and
- Highly responsive, ‘snappy’ user interfaces of the bygone (‘by-going’?) era of desktop applications where the applications are installed on the local computer system (like the old Microsoft Excel)
This magical feat is accomplished by a holistic solution which includes:
- Robust, Scalable, cloud-hosted servers providing RESTful services (typically running on Java EE, C#.Net, Apache).
- Multi-tenant Data (Relational, Unstructured, Distributed) that is stored, sharded and replicated such that it is stored in the most appropriate format and available as close to the requester as possible.
- Dynamic & Responsive front-ends built on powerful, continually evolving Javascript MVC frameworks like Angular (from Google) and Backbone. ‘Dynamic’ ensures that the user interaction is as good (or in many cases much better) than their desktop counterparts and ‘Responsive‘ ensures the applications adjusts (is responsive to) different screen sizes found in desktops, tablets and other mobile devices.