I've blogged before about my view on the future of software development. I argued that there will be a blurring of the line dividing web application development and native/desktop application development. I clearly disagreed with the argument that everything is going to move to the web. One of my key arguments was that the web was originally a presentation or publishing platform, so hacking it into a processing platform just won't be enough.
But a lot has been happening in the web space. HTML5 looks like it's going to change the game and JavaScript just keeps getting faster in all major browsers. Tools like GWT make it easy to write client side web applications using Java and VisualWebGui allows you to do the same with .NET languages.
Clearly Google is one company that is really pushing for the migration to the web. They have created a market place for web applications and have supported HTML5 on their chrome browser and on android. Given the financial and cerebral power of Google, you can bet they have the capacity to make a huge impact.
So is it time for the Webification of all applications? My guess is still no. Google itself is still actively writing desktop applications like Google desktop search and Google earth desktop client. This is because they know that an all out migration to web still doesn't look feasible.
Obviously there will be more and more web applications written than before, but that doesn't mean all applications will be moved to the web. Google knows that and that is why applications targeting android are written with Java to target the android virtual machine without any JavaScript getting involved.
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