Next Gen Websites

the web 1.0 was defined by static html pages and simple cgi scripts.  Web 2.0 was marked by improvements in CSS and HTML capabilities, as well as growing influence of Javascript especially with AJAX to make things a bit more interactive.

The next significant shift in the development of websites is moving a lot more of the page layout and generation to the client side and implemented in javascript.  The web server won’t be generating full pages anymore, only snippets and raw JSON for CRUD operations.

Web 3.0 is enabled through several MVC frameworks such as Backbone.js which encourage application logic to be moved client side to the browser and the server serves up the raw data and persists anything required to the cloud.  These next gen websites give the developer a more clear line between UI code vs server side persistance.

It makes sense to move control of the HTML layout and rendering over to Javascript because that’s what it was designed to do.  Adding a template language and renderer on the server side only to further manipulate the DOM client side is a bit of a duplication of responsibility.

The learning curve for this change is a bit steep.  Check out ToDoMVC for a review of the javacript libraries/frameworks available.