Looking at the past years of application development, as a developer you might have noticed a significant shift from desktop applications to web applications. The Web has evolved as the major platform for applications and is going to take over many facets—not only in development but also in everyday life, resulting in this shift accelerating. Who would have thought 10 years ago that current mobile phones are indeed only very strong ironed notebooks with a permanent Internet connection?

The Internet provides a very direct connection between consumer and producer. For application developers this implies a very easy -to- use- and- handle platform. Looking around, many application frameworks have evolved in recent years in order to be very Internet-centric. These frameworks interpret the Web as an ubiquitous platform for providing not only ordinary web pages, as it was done 10 years ago. The web has become a data provider on top of one of the most proven protocols in industry, the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The core concepts of the Internet being a decentralized highly available network with HTTP as a protocol on top of it are the inner core of a big part of today’s applications. Furthermore, another development took place in the last years. The browser became more and more a replacement of the operating system. Fully fledged web applications like Google Docs, which act and look like desktop applications, are becoming more popular. JavaScript engines like Google V8 or SpiderMonkey are getting insanely fast to deliver web browser performance not thought of several years ago. This means current web applications are now capable of delivering a real user experience similar to applications locally installed on your system.

So many software engineers today are also web engineers as well. This poses a very big problem. As most of software engineering is based on abstraction, many tools, frameworks, and languages try to hide complexity from the engineer, which sounds good at first. No web engineer cares about the fragmentation of the IP packets which are sent throughout the whole world in milliseconds. By abstracting and layering your software to reduce the complexity per layer, you inadvertently might hide features of the underlying protocol your software is built upon. Many frameworks try to resemble the style of programming desktop applications, with the exception of application being in the Web. However, in order to make use of HTTP and its features you cannot easily hide them away in your application framework.