A first step toward programming 21st-century applications
MANUEL SERRANO AND GÉRARD BERRY, INRIA
The Web is becoming the richest platform on which to create computer applications. Its power comes from three elements: (1) modern Web browsers enable highly sophisticated GUIs with 3D, multimedia, fancy typesetting, etc.; (2) calling existing services through Web APIs makes it possible to develop sophisticated applications from independently available components; and (3) open data availability allows applications to access a wide set of information that was unreachable or that simply did not exist before. The combination of these three elements has already given birth to revolutionary applications such as Google Maps, radio podcasts, and social networks.
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2330089
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Extensible Programming for the 21st Century