To awaken a sleeping giant

Developing web applications has been fundamentally different from developing traditional software, right from the beginning. These differences and the need to learn a whole new set of skills has kept many programmers from fully embarking on the web bandwagon.

These are, generally, corporate and independent software vendor (ISV) developers who are making an adequate compensation at their jobs and have not bothered to learn how to use web specific tools. You might say that after all this time, since the inception of the Internet in our lives, there are not so many people in that position. Well, you might surprise your self...

I have talked to several such developers over the last couple of years and I believe that there are millions of people who are in that precise condition. Recently, some of these people have taken a new interest in Web development, due to the introduction of toolkits (libraries, compilers, IDEs) that bring web development closer to the mindset of the traditional developer.

As more and more tools that follow this path become available, more and more these developers that have been asleep for the web development universe will begin to stir. As these tools reach maturity we might discover that they will bring a huge lot of new blood into web applications development.

This huge mass of traditional software developers will enter this new universe using sophisticated tools that expand the borders of web application development, bringing new ideas, not marked by years of working with "normal" web tools such as HTML editors and scripting languages. This sleeping giant might just be about to awaken.

Interesting times should lay ahead...