Build once, deploy everywhere: the web is the only platform
Editor's note: Andrew Mager is reporting from the Future of Web Apps (FOWA 2010) conference, held in Miami from February 22 to 24. Click here to read all of his coverage.
These days we have so many types of mobile devices. Palm took a huge risk when they said that the web will be the main platform for building applications. I personally agree with them.
Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith joined up with Palm for that reason; to make the web more flexible for building apps. WebGL allows you to build rich services right in the web browser now, which is very exciting. Snow Stack using Webkit allows you to use CSS to build transitions and animations right into your web experience.
And Javascript it getting better. Today, JS performs at 100x the speed it did just years ago. Web workers allow us to have background threading that will not affect the user experience.
HTML5 is here too, but it's really just a buzz word for now. We can't really use it effectively yet because legacy browsers rule the web.
The interesting thing about creating mobile apps is that you have to do most of the work on the client. The server is only used for data transfer these days.
jQuery Touch turns out to be a really nice companion to build dynamic web apps on mobile devices. Write a few lines of code and then ship it.
Haptic support is coming too, and these Palm guys are excited about it.