Qconn

Whither Web programming?

Whither Web programming?

Location: 
Grand Ballroom - Salon A/B/C/D
Time: 
Wednesday, 9:00am - 10:10am
Abstract: 

The web browser provides a platform with unmatched reach, but it still suffers from annoying limitations. Building major web applications has been extraordinarily challenging. For the web to thrive, it needs to be competitive with native platforms across the board, especially on mobile devices.   The web must make it easy to develop applications that run on- and off-line, and that provide a first class user experience in terms of performance, features and UI while requiring essentially zero maintenance from the user. Key to this is developer productivity.   Happily, things are getting better. Programmers can expect better performance, better APIs and a great diversity of viable programming languages and tools: IDEs that support live programming in the browser; interesting languages that are not just minor variations on Javascript but actually make programmers significantly more productive; civilized UI frameworks and so on.   We'll show several such systems, some viable today, some more radical, and discuss what is holding them back.   Things are just starting to get interesting!

Gilad.Bracha's picture
Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language and a software engineer at Google where he works on Dart. Previously, he was a VP at SAP Labs, a Distinguished Engineer at Cadence, and a Computational Theologist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun. He is co-author of the Java Language Specification, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk System. He received his B.Sc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.