Someone passed me an interesting link to a recent blog entry by Dave Thomas on what he dubs the RADAR Architecture. It’s a pretty interesting read, and I think that one thing I’d love to see is the browser to become a bit more of a smart client / application platform in the coming years.

One thing that he suggests architecturally in crafting applications is building web-based applications as essentially REST-based services, and separating out what he dubs an “HTML Presentation Server” in one form or another as a thin proxy in front of the actual application. It sounds great to me in theory, but I seriously wonder how much code duplication (logic-wise) would be necessary in order to facilitate that.

Some of the comments on the post seem to talk about how the presentation layer would then be confined to working with a data structure (probably XML) without any smarts in it, instead of having an actual object instance with which you can do some smarter things like validation and what have you.

Either way, it’s a really interesting read, and I’d be willing to bet that Dave’s onto something with the coming years hopefully seeing a transformation of the browser from a dumb recipient into a smarter application client.