The evolution of web publishing

At the beginning of the web era, webmasters and application developers needed IT knowledge to manage and deploy their web sites. They used first-generation tools such as FTP clients.

Years later, online companies started to offer solutions to create and publish web pages without using any IT tools. People started to use FrontPage Extensions to “quickly” publish web pages.

Today, people can create, publish and collaborate online without having any technical knowledge. Web content publishing became mainstream and low-level technical skills are no longer required.

The evolution of web infrastructures

Years ago (and still today), businesses used to purchase, setup and manage their own servers to host and publish their applications. Years later, managed hosting solutions appeared, allowing businesses to host their infrastructures using fully managed services (”we’ll design, host, deploy and manage your infrastructure”). This helped non-IT businesses to get online. However, this was (and still is) very expensive.

Few months ago, Amazon launched Amazon EC2, a cloud computing service allowing individuals and businesses to create flexible and scalable infrastructures. This is a huge step ahead: it allows businesses to deploy applications without managing any hardware. However, it still requires a lot of IT knowledge to setup and deploy an infrastructure.

The future: from low-level to high-level

Google just launched Google App Engine, a new hosting platform enabling application developers to deploy large scale infrastructure WITHOUT any IT knowledge. This will help software engineers to test and publish their applications using Google’s infrastructure and minimize the time to market and hosting costs.

Years ago, low-level assembly, C and C++ languages were used to create software. Today, people tend to use more high-level languages such as Python, .NET and Java. The same pattern also applies for web infrastructures.

Years ago, infrastructure deployment required an extensive knowledge of low-level IT: hardware, config files, etc. Today, we can see more and more high-level solutions. No need to purchase servers, no need to configure load balancers or setup firewalls. The new platforms handle all low-level stuff so you can focus on building your next application.