Web Application Development with Microsoft Technologies

I started to read about the web 3.0 concept.

If you still don’t know what web 2.0 is, then you are in trouble

We are currently living in the 2.0 era. From the user perspective we are talking about users generated content, social sites, information and video sharing, brilliant shapes with rounded colors in the browser, and so on. From the developer point of view we are talking about a lot of client side coding, AJAX , SOA and rich media experiences (video and audio), to let the user feel it is not using a web client application at all.

Web 3.0 extends this concept and let this applications to run in a disconnected world. This mean, mobile.

We can read about several efforts coming from Microsoft, Google and Apple, focusing in this new trend.

So, which options do we have?

Apple has announced announced its strategy to enable third-party browser-like applications to be created using WebKit, the engine that powers its Safari Web browser (http://webkit.org/). Apple is then pointing its strategy to web browser applications to create ocasionally-connected applications in order to run in the iPhone.

But on the other side, Microsoft strategy is focused in building smart applications to run in the devices itself: the new Windows Mobile 6, ships with the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 and SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition installed in ROM, which lends itself to the development of powerful disconnected applications with relatively low cost deployment.

Google is promoting Google Gears (http://code.google.com/apis/gears/), an open source browser extension that lets developers create Web applications that can run offline.

This can be a great choice if you already have some developed ASP.NET applications and need to support a non connected environment. It is less costly, and will have a better user acceptance from your web users. 

Silverlight is still not supoorting the non connected scenario. I still haven’t read if it will.

So, if you are ready to join the web 3.0 trend with Microsoft, you just can pick up either of:

1.- Create a Smart Application running over compact editions of SQL and .NET framework and synchronizing through ActiveSync or,

2.- Add support to your already developed ASP.NET application using Google Gears to work in an offline mode.