Web based applications, the applications of future that will run using the web browser, across multiple platforms and within the sandbox security model without being installed. With Firefox 3 claiming to support offline applications and Google released Google Gears which is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline, also Microsoft pushing Avalon/WPF, XAML and Mozilla pushing XUL as their latest GUI language, it’s sure that the market for web applications will continue to grow more and more. With the OS war increasing and Microsoft loosing the battle on many fronts, MAC and Linux will eat up a lot of Microsoft market share of OS and this will increase the problem for companies targeting a large number of users. But luckily Mozilla Firefox is gaining a lot of popularity and fighting to keep the Internet free from proprietary formats and protocols and push open formats like OpenDocument or ODF, XML, SOAP, etc. Mozilla Firefox 3 will be fully ACID 2 complaint and so developers writing web applications, can easily write web applications that will run on all the complaint browsers without any modifications.

Internet is penetrating to the remotest world at a speed, which no other communication technology has ever achieved earlier. Technologies and Tools like Ajax, JSON, Flash, Adobe Flex and Apollo, OpenLaszlo are boosting the growth of Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Browsers are no more just a thin client, which is used to display the web pages, but are becoming fat clients and share the server load for processing data as well as displaying them. Internet is no more just a repository of web pages of information, but is becoming a processing center, where applications can call routines over Internet using web services; this is the same way as the classical dynamic libraries model. Web services are spread across the Internet sharing load and the application can call the service according to their need. This would not only make the deployment of the new versions easier but also provide new features and critical features as soon as they are available with the users getting customized/localized version of the application based on their locations and preferences without even bothering to download the bandwidth eating setups bundled with multiple locale and skins like in today’s world. It will also make companies easier to track the usage of their application and provide better features and easier navigation for the most used portions of the applications and user will have to pay per usage without having to bother about the malware and spyware that comes free with the sharewares and freewares distributed over the Internet. In a world, where people will pay for the processing power they use, like the water, electricity and mobile bills, internet would become a basic necessity and people would not use internet just for playing games or listening online music, but also for watching television program as per user choice and convenience, like YouTube currently hosts a number of TV shows for online watching, and a lot of mobile network distributing TV shows over 3G networks. Application architecture would shift towards service-orientated architecture (SOA) and applications will be created for both the Desktop and the Web Browser.

Sling Box: Watch Television programs over the Internet.

If you look in the Web2.0 era from a normal computer novice perspective, almost all the applications are now moved to web based. People preferring GMail over Outlook, Messenger integration within browser by Yahoo, Google and other companies like Meebo. Users already started using Google docs and spreadsheet, Writely, JotSpot, Zoho and others for online collaborations and document writing & management. With big companies like Disney going in favor of Google docs over Microsoft word, it can be argued that the data privacy is not a big issues, as compared to the benefits, where the user can watch and edit its data from anywhere in the world and the data is regularly backed up and safe as compared to the PC being affected by millions of viruses, trojans and worms, hard disk crashing frequently and system security being compromised. Google Calendar, Zoho Virtual office, DreamFactory, Zoho Notebook, Zimbra and Scalix (Outlook Alternatives), ThinkFree, 24SevenOffice(CRM & ERP), Xabyl (Visual XBL editor), Google SpreadSheets and EditGrid (web based excel), Nvu (FrontPage type, a web editing environment) and web based photo editing programs like Fauxto, Picnik, Picture2Life, Pixenate, Snipshot are some of the other examples of web based applications.

More and more people and companies relying on SIP and XMPP for communication across the world as compared to traditional communication medium like Phone/SMS and Fax, which cost a lot more. Stuffs like format conversion can be done using web services (Adobe online PDF conversion) and things like data backup will be done using online servers, which will automatically synchronize your local data. Not only that but the browser is being used as a virtual OS using the WebOS/WebTop, which spreads from the mythical GooOS to the pioneers in this field Goowy and the most popular ones eyeOS.

Yahoo purchase of Konfabulator and Flickr and Google purchase of Writely, JotSpot, and the soaring profits of both companies is a clear indication of the growth of web-based applications. With the broadband penetrating even more house and computer prices keep free falling, online web application market will not be limited to just shopping from eBay (world’s best fraud company) and ticket bookings, but will enter into a lot more areas, like distance education/virtual classrooms which will become more widespread and accepted as a normal education.

The growth of languages such as Ruby on Rails, PHP, optimized databases for the web from MySQL and toolkits from Adobe like Flex and Apollo, Flash, JavaScript, JSP, Applets etc., technologies like Ajax and JSON and the adoption of common standard for browser like XMLHttpRequest will help the web application market to grow at an astonishing rate. The vast amount of development efforts behind the open source projects like FCKeditor and companies like Flickr with both Desktop components and Ajax powered next generation website will guide the world to Web 3.0 era. If you see the number of XPCom interfaces Mozilla published and applications written using Mozilla framework like Komodo IDE, Democracy (Internet TV) and SongBird (the music player) you can easily visualize how much powerful web applications can be written which will completely diminish the gap between Desktop and Web. The future web application will be so easy to use and deploy, just like clicking a hyperlink and navigating to some site, like the Microsoft XBAP or like the earlier Java web start. Also Firefox 3 promises support for offline applications, will help people to use those applications offline also.

Finally with the widespread adoption of IPv6 and large amount of embedded network based applications in the home, it may be the case that your microwave oven has a touch screen to browse the Internet, but not having a “Designed for Windows Vista” label on the front panel.