Web 3.0?

Modern days web page is also taking over lot of business logic to its side. The fat client relives the server not just from the UI rendering but also serves as a gateway to the web cloud services. That is IMO Web 3.0 concept: the client is an application on its own and became a nerve cell in collective distributed network brain with server connections as synapses. The server is not in charge of whole process anymore, clients live and interact on its own discretion. That idea defines the complexity we will face in fat client apps. The industry is trying to manage the scope by introducing so called “one page” applications. In another word by splitting the complex tack on primitive ones which do not have any or just little smarts on it. I guess that explains the popularity of AngularJS and its competitors. But sometimes it is a good advantage to have a fat client app or module to leverage the cross-site knowledge and provide appropriate user experience. In my case the sync between version control, Wikipedia hierarchy, documentation sites and test results take too much orchestration if implemented via web 1.0 or web 2.0 patterns. The sequence of hierarchy discovery, sync data with automated and interactive merges, progress updates and error/retries handling do not fit easy into web service – UI pair. Old dogs would advise to look into server-side model with live sync like IceFaces or Vaadin could potentially do. Modern will refer to MeteorJS. While that could be doable (not sure) the idea of keeping live model on server side is hardly scalable. Few hundreds simultaneous sessions will need proportional resources increase. Rather the fat client will use just a bare minimum from each involved server. Happy coding!