&#62; nearly all applications will be web-based in the next 5 years<p>I sincerely hope the author is wrong. I think the almost all the applications which function well on the internet have communication as their core function. I sick fed up of having to use 5 languages (Java/PHP/Ruby/Clojure/Python, SQL, HTML, JavaScript, CSS) just to create a moderately usable UI. Even worse, I'm fed up having to work with crappy unresponsive Enterprise Web based UIs.