There have been a lot of technological advancements that took place in the software industry over the past few years. Introduction of web-based software as simple document viewing and distribution, and its transformation into an extremely popular software deployment platform has helped increase the development of majority of end-user applications.
The evolution of the World Wide Web has not taken place overnight. In the initial stages, web pages were just form-structured documents that primarily contained text along with interspersed static images (no animation). Hyperlinks were used to navigate between pages. Gradually, they became interactive pages, augmented with animated graphics and plug-in components that allowed richer content to be displayed. The introduction of JavaScript made it easier to build animations. The widespread plug-in components such as Shockwave, Flash, etc. has allowed advanced animations, movie clips and audio tracks to be inserted into web pages. More recently, web technologies are intended for the creation of Rich Integrated Applications (RIAs), which combine two important characteristics: collaboration and interaction. The majority of commercial web pages today include interactive pages with augmented graphics. However, there has been a rising trend in web development technologies every day.
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Obviously, many people believe that the existence of web technologies has benefited most of the people; there are some major drawbacks of the Web as an application platform. User interaction issues, performance issues, network and security, interoperability and compatibility, development, testing, and deployment are some of the issues associated with the Web.
Talking about the new trends and technologies aimed at improving the use of the Web, HTML5, JavaScript Language and WebGL- a cross-platform web standard for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics are prominently used throughout the world. HTML5 is a general-purpose web standard that consists not only complements of existing HTML but also has a number of new features. Some of these features include the browser’s history management, the Canvas element, Geolocation API, etc., which helps in eliminating plug-in components and introducing new interfaces and APIs that will be available for JavaScript.
JavaScript 2.0 is the next version of JavaScript language originally planned to be based on the ECMAScript 4 Specification, but was abandoned for various reasons. Parts of those specifications were included for other new standards: ECMAScript 5 and ECMAScript Harmony. Both these standards are aimed to achieve better support for modularity and application maintainability and help eliminates some of the existing flaws in JavaScript.
WebGL, as discussed earlier is a consortium of companies like Apple, Google, and Opera. One of the main features of WebGL is its ability to display 3D graphics natively in the web browser without the use of plug-in components. It is one of the exciting technologies but is often overlooked. It is based on OpenGL ES 2.0. WebGL supports numerous frameworks with their own JavaScript API. A game developer makes the maximum use of WebGL and Canvas while designing their programs and end products. There have also been other interesting developments such as Chromium OS (a browser-based operating system), web runtimes, W3C Web Widget Specification, etc.
Undoubtedly, the World Wide Web has evolved tremendously starting from a simple document browsing and distributed environment into a rich software platform in which desktop-style applications are of more value, we can still notice some of its traditional uses in many areas like for example using of public components. However, ongoing advancements are rapidly transforming the whole scenario of web development. The transition towards web-based applications will not only open up possibilities for new technologies to emerge resulting in the development and deployment of end-user software but also in the research of software engineering, thus making binary end-user software to be limited to system software.
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