The client side is coming into its own

If you’ve been spending your time on server-side development and feel nostalgic for the client side, don’t miss the boat. I was recently reading Google Gears — When Offline Is Online and noticed its mention of HTML 5, the current draft specification.

If you’re wondering why I’m talking about HTML, take a look at HTML 5.0. You’ll probably be surprised by what’s in the spec. There’s persistent storage on the client, threading and TCP/IP broadcasting, for instance. Yes, all that and more in the browser. The spec clearly points toward a web of applications and the browser as an all-in-one platform for running them.

I was also interested in the JavaScript features that arrived in Firefox 2.0 or are coming in Firefox 3.0. It makes sense for JavaScript to keep growing and evolving as more code runs directly in the browser.

• New in JavaScript 1.7
• New in JavaScript 1.8