klint

These new tools are fairly different from the client-server applications of the 90s (and 00s and even now). Those desktop applications did have a lot of chrome on the client side, but the "real work" was being done on the server. Normal AJAX apps are more like those 90s apps - the UI lives in the client, but they rely more heavily on the server than a CouchApp would.

That said, all these Meteor and Firebase apps could end up having quite a bit of middleware and end up not seeming all that radical, depending on how much stuff gets added on.

Right - it's not that no pages are going to be rendered and transmitted. You've obviously got to get the HTML/CSS/JS into your browser somehow. There's also going to be a certain amount of heavy lifting that will keeping happening server side - big data analytics and all that.

But the trend is towards doing less rendering server side and more on the client side, with just the raw data being pushed around rather than the presentation of that data.