Software Development on the Web is undergoing a revolution. We've had the ability to build responsive, useable, dynamic applications for quite a while now. But no one has capitalized on it. No one has been building those applications. Most web developers are still stuck in the WebPage mode of design and not the WebApp mode of design. Thankfully, companies like Google are starting to give the WebApp design philosophy some high profile attention with apps like Gmail and Google Maps. So what exactly is the difference? There are a number of radical differences between WebApp and WebPage Design modes. Each has a use in website designing. Webpage Design is about presenting information. It focuses on making the content readable, understandable, and locatable. Reference sites, and online literature sites do well with this design philosophy. Blogs are another instance where the WebPage Design philosophy works well. \ WebApp Design, on the other hand, focuses on responsive, dynamic, realtime action. Sites that allow the user to do something benefit the most from this approach. The Administration front ends to Reference sites, a WebMail site, and Online Game sites are all excellent candidates for the web app approach to design. Elements of these approaches to design are now getting combined in interesting ways. Google's autocomplete feature is one example. A melding of the two can only be beneficial to Web Development trends. In future articles I will be talking about some of the technologies that make these trends possible.

I am slowly getting some of my old article's back up and online. You will start to see them in the links under pages on the sidebar. As I determine they are useful or helpful I will put them back up. The first is Perl and CGI part I I really should do part II of that one I suppose :-)

Over at A List Apart They are talking about custom DTD and Modular XHTML So I thought I'd dig up an old article I wrote on the subject and share it with you yet again. The Power of Modular XHTML

So work has bought me the perl deployment kit from ActiveState. It allows me to compile perl scripts into executables. I think it builds on the experimental perlcc and family of utilities. All I can say is wow is that cool or what. It allows me take perl scripts I design to make administration tasks easier and turn them into executables for use elsewhere without installing perl on the target computer. I can make system tray applications, system services, and standalone executables. I am going to have a lot of fun with this.

Eclipse 3.1 has been released. I am a big fan of Eclipse. It is quite possibly the best all around IDE for developers out there. It may be a bit slow compared to a non java app, but has all the features you need.

• It handles pretty much every language you can think of.
• Works on most every platform.
• Supports multiple versioning systems out of the box.
• Has built in debugging support. Including a lot of great features for the web developer. Like running a web server process with the ability to step through your code.

What more can you ask for. The Eclipse GUI interface (SWT) is significantly faster than its java counterparts also. I'd highly recommend taking it for a spin. It even supports a sophisticated update and patch downloading system to make keeping it up to date easy. That's something a lot of Open Source systems are lacking lately.