I worked on a contract for Petronas in Malaysia (Retail Oil Division). We built a pay at pump system, with a centralized processing server to the different major cc providers (Am Ex, Visa, Mastercard).

The server was built using Java on a BEA Weblogic App server with Oracle Backend. Each station had a mini station controller (To manage the different pumps and manage the queue and messaging to the central server). This was built with Tomcat & SQL Lite.

While not connected to the internet, the system was almost entirely built with web programming and hardware hacking.

Web programming generally means stuff that runs in the browser; not networking/sockets, etc.

When these discussions come up, focus drifts towards the "all apps should be browser apps" contention. That's silly, but it's true that more and more apps can benefit from networked components. Would I want to run photoshop in my browser? Hell no, not for a few tech generations. But, would I like photoshop to automagically backup my assets and edit history onto some highly-available, redundantly stored file server? Defintely.

Some hospitals are run off of web apps. They're internally hosted and cost $20M/install, but they still run in IE.

And sometimes it's IE6. No, it won't work on other browsers. No, they won't update or re-write the software - it was a nightmare to get developed the first time around.

Our software works on IE6-7 & Firefox, but yes, it can be a nightmare to support newer browsers.

By "Nightmare", I was thinking more of the dysfunctional tender + waterfall process that some large contracts (especially public or government) are prone to. If the development is so very painful, requests for change are not going to be looked kindly upon.

I don't know that it is nonsense, but it is an overstatment.

Personally, the vast majority of programs I use on a regular basis are desktop based, and I cannot find a good web app to replace them (some of them have web app versions, but sorely lacking in features I need): Python, PyDee (soon to be renamed Spyder), MS Outlook, MS Word, SQL Server Management Studio (and associated suite like SSIS...), MS Excel GIMP

And when I have a few free minutes for a game, it is on a disc in a PS3.

Also, when I do my own personal programming (I'm a DBA, not developer by trade, but I do little custom things for myself and friends at night), I can do them both more easily and in a more polished fashion for a desktop gui than by running them through a browser. This may change as browsers mature (and I learn more about browser based programming) but for right now I find desktop apps are almost always higher quality than the web based versions.

He didn't say "All programming is web programming", he said, "All programming will be web programming".

Then he should pick better titles for his blog posts.