Wednesday, 16 June 2004, 16:14:36 EDT

Maybe it is just the geek in me but I love reading good articles by fellow programmers. Joel Spolsky is one of the best; his articles are funny and usually spot on. His latest one is about the direction software development is heading and why he believes Microsoft is in danger of missing out, or rather, why Microsoft's biggest product is not looking so good to developers any more. He states that more and more developers are moving to web based development because their work is just easier in the long run. When one develops for the web he knows that the users are all going to be using the same version because he controls which version is used at all times. The user can only access the application through a web agent. This also gives the benefit that the user does not have to use the same operating system as the developer nor any of the other users. This is why I have grown to enjoy web development. I can write some decent applications that, while not as interactive as I would like, work everywhere. I don't have to worry about the platform the user is on, although I sometimes have to work around IE bugs and lack of support. Recently, though, I have started wanting to write some "rich," to put it in Joel's words, applications that work in conjunction with web applications. For example, I am currently writing a web application that will allow users to log in and post files. The user will be able to post the file for private storage, send it to another user, or mark it as a public file. After I have the web application feature complete I want to go back and possibly write a Mono based application to interact with it. Not only would this allow me to write an interface that is more user friendly but it will give me a chance to learn a new programming language, something that is fun to me, and still have the application be cross platform.

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