A lot of people have shown interest in Aristochat and the Superfeedr chat last week. However, I haven’t talked about what is – according to me – the greatest thing about it : it’s hosted on Github. Not only the source code, but the app itself, and since it’s a basic HTML file with a little bit of Javascript, it could have very been hosted on EC2 as well, or on any type server that can server HTML file.
This blog is also a great example : technically, it’s an app, and yet, it’s made of static HTML files, hosted on Github as well. I think these 2 examples can give us a “hint” on what Web apps will look like in a not so distant future :
- A bunch of static HTTP files with CSS, served by clusters
- A lot of Javascript inside these pages to enhance the user experience with effects, drag and drops… etc
- Some AJAX to send and receive data from one (or more) application servers, through APIS (JSON, or XML)
The great thing about that is that web services (and developers) can focus on a single “job”, while designers, UX engineers can ‘pick’ up whatever tool they want to integrate into an app and make it richer.
With this approach, you can really decouple more and more the data and the processing from the views. The APIs can very well be consumed by a webservice, but also by, say, an iPhone App, an Adobe Air App, or even external web services and we sites.
This should sound familiar, doesn’t it? It’s very close from the MVC model that we all learnt to create desktop apps.
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