So long and thanks for all the phish

Mark Gibbs' Web site tips, plus network applications news headlines

"The last ever Dolphin message [when they departed Planet Earth just before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass] was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the 'Star Spangled Banner,' but was, in fact, a message: So long, and thanks for all the fish." - "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams

Well, folks, this is it, the last issue of the Network World Web Applications Alert newsletter in the history of the universe.

This newsletter (to paraphrase The Dead Parrot Sketch will be "passing on"! It will be no more! It will cease to be! It will expire and go to meet its maker! It will be stiff! Bereft of life, it will rest in peace! It will kick the bucket, shuffle off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and join the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-NEWSLETTER!!

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"The last ever Dolphin message [when they departed Planet Earth just before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass] was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the 'Star Spangled Banner,' but was, in fact, a message: So long, and thanks for all the fish." - "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams

Well, folks, this is it, the last issue of the Network World Web Applications Alert newsletter in the history of the universe.

This newsletter (to paraphrase The Dead Parrot Sketch will be "passing on"! It will be no more! It will cease to be! It will expire and go to meet its maker! It will be stiff! Bereft of life, it will rest in peace! It will kick the bucket, shuffle off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and join the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-NEWSLETTER!!

So, as threatened a couple of weeks ago when I announced the demise of this organ, I thought I'd ponder the past and future of the topic of this newsletter: Web applications.

The first issue of this newsletter was published on Dec. 14, 1998, and over the course of some 2,000 issues and almost 13 years I've been pretty liberal with my interpretation of what counts as a Web application. This has allowed me to examine everything from Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), APIs, hardware for accelerating Web transactions, software tools, languages, user interface design, Web server applications, phishing, spam, online virtual reality, you name it, we've sliced and diced it.

What's clear is just how far we've come. From simple HTML through Flash, Java, JavaScript, the rise of Perl, Python, ASP, Apache all the way to today with HTML5 and CSS3 as the emerging standards for Web page markup, mobile data everywhere, HD movies distributed across the 'Net and accounting for about 30% of the 'Net's total bandwidth, and billions of people worldwide online every day.

From the wild evolution of the last 13 years I'd be hard-pressed to pick a greatest hardware development in the Web applications world; the driving forces that have shaped hardware have morphed so rapidly over that period that no single technology really stands out. I guess I'd choose DSL and cable Internet services as the most important as they are the technologies that have enabled widespread end user availability.

On the software front there are many candidates for greatest technology to choose from: Video delivery technologies, the Apache Web server, AJAX, XML, Ruby on Rails, and Java are just a few that come to mind. But for my top pick I'm going to have to cheat because I'm selecting two products: Search driven by Google's PageRank algorithm and social networking courtesy of Facebook. I'm picking these two because they have arguably caused the greatest shifts in and impact on what the Internet and the Web have become.

My son was just five years old when I started this newsletter in 1998. Back then you couldn't watch videos online, texting was hardly used, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter didn't exist, Google was just getting started, you couldn't browse the Web while driving down the freeway ... in fact, most people didn't know what the Web was! At the age of 18 now, this is a world that my son wouldn't recognize; not being connected is nothing he or the rest of his generation have ever experienced.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.