Web 3.0 /= Web 2.0++

A couple of years ago when Web 2.0 was really getting going I told some people that I thought Web 2.0 was pretty much the end of the line for web applications. Web 3.0, I said, would actually be a trend back to desktop applications using the Internet for data delivery. Think more like virtual machine based apps like good old Java applets that never really went anywhere back in the early days of Java.

Lets just say I got some incredulous stares back then, like I might have been from a different planet and next thing I would be predicting $5 a gallon gas or something crazy like that.

My rationale was that JavaScript in an of itself was the major vehicle for web applications these days, at least portable ones that is. But it seemed clear to me that JavaScript is just not a good language for delivery for major application functionality. While its a powerful dynamic language it has many issues and is distinctly married to the web browser. As applications get bigger and bigger large volumes of JavaScript get harder and harder to manage. While there were some promising movements towards standardized JavaScript libraries for app development they were too big and too slow for efficient delivery of an application in a standard web page.

Hence I saw that there would ultimately arise a class of standalone applications, probably still delivered via a web browser initially, that would get their data via standard Internet HTTP protocols, perhaps incorporating JavaScript, perhaps not and they would run either connected or disconnected. Stuff like AJAX would be utilized to deliver application and data updates on the fly. All in all we'd see application logic migrate more and more to the client side and due to the bifurcation of client platforms into Windows, Mac, mobile devices (Windows, Symbian and other) and also eventually Linux that would necessitate some cross platform operating environment on those clients - something like a virtual machine or cross platform sandbox seemed an obvious requirement.

So I guess I feel somewhat vindicated now that we have a burgeoning set of development platforms like Adobe AIR, Google Gears, and now even an "application centric" new browser from Google called Chrome. Not to mention other efforts by Microsoft (Silverlight) and Sun (JavaFX) that have yet to see significan't uptake for client side application development.

So if Web 3.0 really is a revolutionary take on the web and certainly more than an incremental twist on web 2.0 then what might web 4.0 be? I'm afraid I don't have any early insights on that, but trust me I'm trying to get my head around it even as I type.