This installment of the 10′s Series is about enhanced GUI features. I think the two items I’m going to discuss are possible now in most frameworks and that is why I don’t think they are far-fetched. In some ways I feel we are nearing the home stretch of Web 2.0 and approaching whatever they call it next (2.5?). Web 2.0 has been about interaction and using the browser as a platform for applications, moving the web closer to the desktop. It’s meant other things as well, but I think the summation covers a lot of 2.0.The advent of Chrome OS (as well the platforms that inspired it) and the push for HTML 5 are shoving us ahead into the next.

Web OS / Web Desktop /etc.

There are lots of Web OS’ in the wild today, EyeOS is probably the most notable one. Web OS’ haven’t caught on as much as I thought they would a few years ago when I heard of them. I think we were waiting for the ‘Cloud’. I can see a web page styled as a desktop used several ways, but I think it is a logical step in the evolution of web interfaces. Imagine logging into your web site and having a desktop OS-like sitting in front of you. You have a desktop to save shortcuts to work or your favorite tools, you have a Start-like menu to navigate your site’s tools and features. You open your articles listing and a list of icons opens in a window on your desktop, each an article. You open your images or media folder and you see thumbnails instead of the old list of links. You minimize your images folder, which is now a tab on your taskbar, and open a new article. You type it up, drag an image into it from your images folder and save it. You then open your web site in a new tab or in a browser window on your web desktop and see the article on your home page.

A web desktop as an administrative interface to a web site seems like an intuitive way to manage a web site. It not only makes managing a web site more familiar, but it also opens it up to a whole new set of capabilities. I can also see the desktop being useful on the user side of a web site. A lot of people may think this seems silly and just a fad, but when I said, a few years ago, Google would be building a web-based operating system, they thought it was silly as well. Now Chrome OS is coming up quickly and it uses AppEngine, a web-based application platform. Here, I’ll do it again, Facebook will be building a web desktop. The PHP frameworks that hit it big in the 2010′s will have capabilities to launch web desktops and the apps to use on them.

Web IDE

I’ve been grappling with this one for a while now. We have 3 client computers in my house and I spend almost equal amounts of time on 2 of them. I try to use them both for development, using Eclipse and SVN, but something seems to always go wrong or I forget to update my repo. I have found tools like PHPAnywhere, but I don’t want my development code on someone’s server. What I want is an IDE, like Eclipse, built into my web site. I doubt I’m the only person that thinks an IDE built into a framework (or at least on top of the framework) would be useful and a huge boost in project development efficiency. Implemented effectively, a web IDE could virtually replace conventional version control tools. At the very least, an IDE could supplement version control enough to ease the headaches that come from managing repositories for large projects.

To wrap it up so far, a 2010’s framework should have:

• Powerful template system for the web designer (1)
• Dynamic “Core” (1)
• Flexible low-level configuration (1)
• Web-based Desktop
• Web-based Integrated Development Environment

To be continued…

Tags: 2010's, Frameworks, PHP, Web IDE, Web OS

This entry was posted on December 30, 2009 at 8:03 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Blog by David Dyess II No Comments Yet