Tangiblemind

I’ve just received the last JDJ Newsletter by email, and start reading it about the next AjaxWorld conference. Please visit http://ajaxworld.com/ for more information.

They just started to introduce the keynotes for March, and the first is the Douglas Crockford’s one. The teaser is:

“The web needs fixing. The standards and recommendations that define the web were last revised in 1999. Since then, the web has grown from a document retrieval system into an application delivery system. It is overly complex, visually underpowered, and hopelessly insecure. Plus it is now under competitive assault by new proprietary platforms that hope to capture the next generation of applications. Can a system as large and as open as the web heal and adapt itself to the challenges of the 21st Century?”

Does it sound familiar to any web developer around here? especially to those who started in the 90s, isn’t it?

His aim, of course, is to show that it can, and to explain how. Considering that he calls mashups as “the most interesting innovation in software development in at least 20 years”, maybe we can already understand the role that Douglas would assign to them, the truly “killer middleware” of the “new” open platform.

But, can we be sure about what to consider the challenges of the 21st Century, to use Douglas’ words?

Douglas Crockford is currently an architect at Yahoo!, but he has developed office automation systems and done research in games and music at Atari. He was director of technology at Lucasfilm Ltd. He was director of new media at Paramount. Douglas was the founder and CEO of Electric Communities also known as Communities.com. He was also founder and CTO of State Software, where he discovered JSON, the popular data interchange format.