Web 3.0 is a world in which an ordinary user can become a programmer

Many would agree that the era of Web 2.0 is coming to an end. Today I will tell you about some startups of the next generation and predict the death of some Web 1.0 bison. The past few years have passed under the slogan "User generated content", the following under the two new ones:

• User generated applications.
• Platforms.

Let's start with User generated applications.

One of the main reasons for the popularity of PHP is the number of free and easy to install products: Wordpress, MediaWiki, phpBB, Drupal & Joomla - all of them can be easily found on most sites on the Internet. The percentages of 90% of solutions based on them differ only in configuration (design / plug-ins), so the launch of a project essentially consists only of the deployment.
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The industry responded to this with the SaaS model (Software as a Service) - sites such as Wordpress.com & Blogger.com allow you to create your own blog, and you can customize it so that it looks like a standalone solution. An example is Graceless Failures , the Twitter blog about Scala. Own domain and the absence of signs of a third-party platform in the design. Mail lists / Google Groups are the de facto standard among open source projects, and if your users need a familiar forum interface - no problem, take a look at the Mono forums , of course they did not put any phpBB, and you just have an interface to the mail lists from the Nabble project . Google Sites allows any small to medium-sized firm to manage its website without any help, and Shopify helps you open your store.

The time when you need a programmer to create an average website passes. The most that you can use is design. The rest for you will make smart services.



Let's start with Iceberg. This application was launched in early summer and has already managed to thunder on the western Internet. Project management & Customer relationship management are the basis of the activities of any company, therefore Web 2.0 products from 37 signals & ZOHO were met with a bang. Their two main problems are the ability to customize and post their data on the Internet. The Iceberg project was created to solve them.

An excellent review of the project can be found on the RRW website. Iceberg follows the principles of Model Driven Architecture , in which a regular user can create his application through a web interface, creating components and establishing relationships between them (like the has_many & belongs_to associations in Ruby on Rails). Wonderful website Learning Iceberg tells the manager how he can stop kicking his programmer and automate his own business processes. Unlike 37 Signals products, Iceberg can work within a local network. It is written, by the way, on .NET.



The next MDA-powered application will be Wufoo , a startup supported by the well-known Y Combinator. This project will allow you to create any form without any problems, among the examples there are simple bug trackers, order forms or job applications. Does your programmer take a week to do this, but only after he is released? Create your own form from a pile of customizable components and get a beautiful report with graphs and export to Excel.



Since we are talking about Excel, I don’t want to mention DabbleDB . Excel was one of the products that allowed Microsoft to capture the business sector. In the demo video on their website they show how you yourself can transfer your spreadsheets to the web interface, and in addition make it faster to the Django or Symfony admin panel.

Here they are, three flagships in the direction of user generated apps. The MDA model has long been known in the Enterprise world, and is now experiencing a new birth with the popularizations of DSL (Domain Specific Languages). I think everyone will agree that most of the work in small / medium-sized companies (corporate sites and automation of business processes) is basically a collection of requirements and customization of an existing product, or routine coding functionality. Over time, tuning becomes simpler, and using ready-made solutions is cheaper than programmer's content.

Already, few people write their ERP / CMS, but the number of 1C / Bitrix / Anything-integrators (note, not "programmers", namely "integrators") is growing. In USA, no one assembles computers on their own (buy at Dell is much cheaper), and with the development of virtualization, we again return to mainframes, no one runs from a computer, setting up an office to a computer / setting up a network / ... Normal hosting dies: for $ 20 You can take VPS with 256MB of RAM and put the version of PHP you need, and if you need to deploy your blog / website, then a bunch of services are at your service, where you concentrate only on your task and do not do programming / hosting. Not many hosters are able to compete with Amazon EC2 / Slicehost / Engine Yard.

The computer industry is developing with huge steps and professionalism becomes the most important requirement. How many people like to write here - any schoolboy / student interested in computers is a freelancer, and so the freelancing market will soon undergo a big blow from such services, “freelancer substitutes”.

Now a little about fun - the platform.

A wave of familiar blogs, forums and CMS, of which a regular site consists of has already subsided, and if we talk about the latest news in the world of Python, Ruby, PHP and others, then the main topic will be frameworks. The main catholizers of a successful online business can now become only a unique idea and a quick means for its implementation.

Web services, Facebook, OpenSocial, iPhone, Android, Google Maps, YouTube, Messaging, Open Standards, Cloud Computing - this is where the “war” will unfold on the Internet in the near future. Now the phrase “I do a Mash-Up or participate in Startup” replaces the previously popular “I do Web-sites”. Less all will have to worry designers - their services will be needed for a long time, you will not automate the design, but you can start thinking about web-administrators-coders. However, professionals will always be needed, but if you are a coder and your work can be automated, and you do not know what the complexity of the algorithm is and all sorts of O (n), then it will not be easy to retrain.

It makes no sense to describe all these Buzz-words listed above, they develop quickly, just as our lives change. However, if you have not heard of them, you should pay attention, suddenly it is the "killer" of your craft.

And again about the sad and moralizing.

In general, my advice to you is to follow the industry, do not focus on certain things and expand your horizons. It is not at all clear what the Internet and its developer will look like in 5-10 years. Many people blame our education for not being taught HTML / PHP / ... Gentlemen, education will teach you to think and adapt to life. And PHP in 10 years may not be, but the mathematics that you skipped, doing the next site, will remain.