Pushing Data, Not Pages is the New Model for Application Development

It's the same old client-server model as it used to be done in 1990'ies. The article feels quite wrong with it's claim "The old client-server model involved doing most of the work on the server side and then piping the results down to a dumb client." - that's not client-server model; client-server development model involves smart clients which we abandoned in the last decade because of concerns about portability, installation problems and version update management. And now the cycle completes once more...

<i>"a design philosophy of sending data to apps, not rendered pages"</i><p>I think we need to invent a term for this. How about "AJAX"?

I feel somewhat excited about that. It means we're getting closer and closer to Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a "semantic web":<p>"I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize."

I don't see this trend picking up beyond the scope of web applications for some time due to one simple problem: search engines. A large amount of content on the web is still meant to be openly consumed and found, and until search engines are able to run the resultant JS to generate the page, any sort of content-generating website will need to be able to render the pages as HTML. This client-heavy paradigm fits perfectly for "applications", but for now I don't think it can pervade elsewhere--unless someone's come up with a solution to this I'm unaware of.

I agree with the "Pushing Data" part and disagree with the "Not Pages". An important "dumb client" still exists: the CDN. I think a popular model in the near future will be to push server-rendered HTML to a CDN, along with JavaScript that the ultimate client uses to get whatever has changed since that HTML was rendered.

That thing on the page scares me. Is that what Missingno. would really look like?

It's not the "same old client/server model" from legacy systems. Essentially it's a publishing model that embraces mobile, cloud and in-memory data computation. ie, real-time data sync and the democratization of data analysis.