Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

We wrote an article a couple of days ago about programming languages and their future on the Web as a basic for cloud computing or Software as a Service (SaaS). This seems to be a concern of a lot of people, since there are a number of news items about this same subject on the Web this morning. These articles talk mainly about the big five: Javascript, PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby.

I have written in three of these, and can attest to their flexibility. As an example, however, I have seen a number of cloud “office” applications written in these languages, such as those at Google. Either the programmers of those applications have not yet had the time to turn them into real, useful business apps or the languages are somehow deficient for that purpose.

I very much enjoy PHP and use it with some regularity. Javascript has some limitations, but the AJAX framework is taking care of at least part of that. I have done a little Perl, but not enough to have an opinion. Ruby is suspect in my mind for scalability reasons. Python rocks.

But I have never seen a word processor, or a graphics package, or anything else (except maybe Plurk) running in a browser, written in any of these languages that can hold a candle to a compiled app running locally. Part of that is the intimacy with the hardware, which is hard to attain without serious security issues. Part of it is speed; our connections to the internet are not as fast as our local bus.

But I think part of it is also the languages themselves. I will know that these problems have been solved when someone starts marketing a Web word processor as agile as Word or a Web graphics package as good and full-featured as Photoshop. That time has not yet come.