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PWA, How Did We Get Here?

Back in the mid 90’s we only had one cross platform choice for building internet connected applications and that was HTML, CSS and JavaScript. So why is it now that after 25+ years have passed we are back to building internet connected applications with HTML, CSS and JavaScript and calling them Progressive Web Apps? Join me as we journey from the webs earliest beginnings to get back exactly where we started, or have we?

Along the way we’ll visit old friends like Flash who was to many the first way to add interactivity to web pages. Discuss the introduction of AJAX where the web started to catch up. Shudder at the seismic shift after the introduction of the iPhone and mobile apps only to be challenged by cross platform mobile development platforms like Apache Cordova. Now, we are back to building plain old web apps and what have we learned along the way and what might be coming next?

Simon MacDonald

Simon MacDonald

Head of Developer Experience at Begin

Simon has over twenty years of development experience and has worked on a variety of projects including object-oriented databases, police communication systems, speech recognition and unified messaging. His current focus is contributing to the open source Architect project to enable developers to create functional web applications. Simon’s been building web applications since the days they were written using shell scripts and he still has nightmares about those dark days.

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