It is almost as if the web has been just incubating for the last ten or twelve years and then all the sudden it seems to be just bounding with innovation (or I was just too far into my depression and/or too busy building the business this last year to notice). It is like it is in the early stages of a renaissance. Sure some cool things came out like .NET, SOA, PHP and MySQL 5, XHTML and Web Services over the last several years. But for the most part it was business as usual. It was mostly back end stuff; new features to old stand bys or different ways of doing the same old stuff. Nothing really exciting was coming out. The basic mechanics of web development has not really changed all that much since the the late 90's. If you really look at it, there was a markup language (html or xhtml), CSS, graphics, flash, JS on the front end and a scripting language and a database on the back end. The only really major turning point was when Netscape died and pretty much enabled cross browser CSS and JS (Well, sort of).
But now it seams like a FLURRY of developments and innovations are all happening all at once: AJAX, FLEX, Apollo, Flash 9, a bazillion Frameworks, ZK, Ruby on Rails, Eclipse, more web development plug-ins for firefox than you can shake a stick at, and so on and so forth....
These are some really exciting times and I am totally pumped about being a web developer. I am so overwhelmed and excited about it I just don't know where to start with all the new toys I have to play with. I have a hard time getting to sleep knowing about all these new toys... It is like everyday is Christmas Eve and I am 7 yrs old all over again....
I am a luck man because I wake up each and every day looking forward to the wonders that the new day will bring.
