Will Emscripten/Asm.js kill Web-Development as we know it?

Re:Will Emscripten/Asm.js kill Web-Development as we know it? by fennecfoxen on Thursday March 28, 2013 @09:11AM (#5454543)

"Think about a native-like Frontend Experience that communicates with a cloud backend for compute-intensive tasks, stores all your data in the cloud and is availabe for you on any PC with a browser in the state you left off."

Are there any extant models where this actually happens, browser-based frontend or no? I'm dubious. What user-interactive tasks exist which are compute-intensive but data-light and latency-tolerant enough to make such an offloading make sense? Are there any existing non-browser-based applications which actually offload significant amounts of work to cloud servers? Even the much-hyped SimCity "it does work in the cloud!" is doing 99% of the simulation client-side.

The closest I can get to this is MMOs and FPSs (where remote computation is mostly because of the multiuser shared state you need) and things which are essentially data lookup services like Google or Google Maps (and I'm not sure whether those fit the profile the author had in mind).

Am I missing anything notable?

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Re:Will Emscripten/Asm.js kill Web-Development as we know it? by kayoone on Thursday March 28, 2013 @09:36AM (#5454655)

Well for apps like Mathematica or simulation staff it could make sense. Also running things like 3D Studio in the browser while the rendering is done in the cloud could work fairly well. This wouldnt require the frontend to be in the browser obv, but when i work on something in the office, get home and see the same state of the app on my pc at home, that would be pretty nice.

[ Parent | on HN ]