Google working on advanced Web engineering

Google is working on a number of advanced programming technologies to ease complex Web application development, a Google engineer revealed at a conference for software developers.

"We're getting to the place where the Web is turning into a run time integration platform for real components," said Alex Russell, speaking at the EclipseCon, held in Reston, Virginia. At Google, Russell works on the Chrome browser. He is also the creator of the widely used Dojo JavaScript framework. Despite its popularity, the Web offers only relatively primitive programming capabilities, compared to other platforms for delivering applications, such as Java or Microsoft Windows. One major shortcoming is that Web technologies don't have a "common component model," which slows code testing and reuse, he said. Google is working on a number of different projects to bring some advanced software engineering concepts to the Web, Russell said. The idea is to introduce low-level control elements without making the Web stack more confusing for novices. "We're learning from platforms [that] started at a very low-level," he said. Much of the power of the Web, Russell admitted, comes from its ease of use. Developers can view and reuse source code. Browsers are forgiving of errors, and technologies such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) offer simple methods to execute complex tasks, such as formatting text.