A few weeks ago I visited the Future of Web Apps event in London. One of the most interesting sessions I attended was a talk on scalable architectures by Sandy Jen, the brains behind a popular service called Meebo (an instant messaging program) that was launched 5 years ago. In this blog post I wanted to recap on some of the key points in the session.

Sandy mentioned a few challenges that we need to cope with when building a website or web application. First of all, we need to make sure that the site is going to have the same user experience (UX) across all browsers and devices. Second, we need to take into consideration that the user might not have a stable Internet connection. Users also don't favour the idea of refreshing the page so utilising Ajax could provide a good investment from a UX point of view. Forcing users to download an external application to make our site enjoyable is also a thing of the past; therefore it is a good idea to avoid that approach. Finally we are still boxed in a browser: despite the browser's limitations, we still need to match our users' expectations.