I'm starting to feel like html/js/css is starting to become the 'this will be the year of linux on the desktop' of apps.
They're flexible technologies, but don't think they'll ever have the feel of purpose built native API's.
They're flexible technologies, but don't think they'll ever have the feel of purpose built native API's.
I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you, but desktop apps are still very widely used by all sorts of people. This includes home users, business users, scientific users, software developers, academics, and so forth.
Even when it comes to web browsing, traffic from non-desktop devices is generally only around 10% to 15% of a site's total traffic these days, for sites that aren't specifically targeting mobile users. The remaining 85% (or more) of traffic is coming from people who are, guess what, using web browsers implemented as desktop apps.
If you only work with IE9+ (all the other browsers are quite good now) you will be working in a run time environment that is far superior to those available in the DHTML/Ajax era.
Another issue is that very few people know how to do large scale JS applications, where I work we do (130,000K+ lines of code, 900+ classes) but it has taken us several iterations to get to this stage.
I believe we are planning on making our tools open-source so hopefully people will start to see that large scale JS apps are very doable. www.caplin.com if you want to keep an eye on the open sourcing of our tooling.
It's not likely that any client would use all of our code and so we have build a tool framework that only pulls in the JS code that your application uses, this is done without a build and is immediately available (add a 'new namespace.sub.Class()' line and hit f5 and it will be in the js bundle you get.)
We bundle js, css, xml, i18n tokens etc.
All automatic and requiring no build.