Developers should not believe the HTML5 hype

As an Architect and Lead developer, I have to sit down with the non-techie and convince them why I think a technology or framework is the right one for a project and then I build my team to deliver the solution. The past two years or so, the marketing engine of technology companies have been spinning at full throttle. HTML5 is a the future, everything will run in the browser and more blah blah blah.
Don't get me wrong, HTML5 brings some good technologies to the web application developer. Nevertheless, I think there is a lot of hype as HTML5 doesn't really bring anything new to the table.
First of all, there are multiple type of applications that we are all well-aware of;

• Consumer
• Business
• Enterprise

Consumer Application

If you are building a consumer oriented application which doesn't use any of the native functionality of OS, then I would recommend the application to be built in HTML5 and all the RIA fanfare that comes with it. You can best view this in the mobile space where developers build either native or web apps depending on the application requirement. Remember that web application (HTML5 ) do not have direct access to printers, USB port or any other hardware such as Bluetooth and network services. Simple word processing application that can be developed in HTML5 such as Google Doc (where this blog is typed from). I haven't come across any serious application written in HTML5 or the likes yet (JavaFX, Flash and Silverlight are not HTML5).

Business Application

Critical business application such as POS which requires access to barcode scanner as an example can't be written using HTML5. You can have a native application delivered through the browser such as Java Applets ( or JavaFX) using webstart. Java applets can access OS features and hardware and provides another layer of security. Business application are delivered in controlled environments, for example, the application can be deployed on Linux desktop in company "a" environment only. For as much "fanfare" one might create around HTML5, these type of application will not cease to exist.

Enterprise Application

Enterprise applications come in various forms, from desktop to servers. As this is a comparison to HTML5, I will only focus on desktop application. First, let take a financial company such as a stock brokerage firm. There is a reason why stock trading application run as closely to the OS as possible ( and also to the exchange), in one word, PERFORMANCE. Web browsers performance sucks regardless of which one you are using, JavaScript is just too slow to implement some of the logic. In the trading business, a millisecond is all that is required to lose millions of £. Can you for one second imagine building a Bloomberg trading platform using web technologies, that's laughable. There is a reason why the finance industry are still using Java Swing as their desktop technology of choice.

Conclusion

HTML5 is a promising step in the right direction to building scalable robust web application but it will not obliterate desktop applications, not today, not tomorrow, not ever (really!?). We can already see it in the mobile space where developers rather write native application so that they can utilize OS features and hardware. Web applications cannot access you local files directory (I am not talking uploading a file to a site) to read or write.  A simple operation such as reading available space in a directory or writing a log to a local directory is not possible (again I am not talking about downloading or saving a page). Therefore, developers should not believe the hype. HTML5 is not the silver bullet and it is a shame when companies such as Adobe sends mix-messages by discontinuing their Flex offering. Anyway, Adobe has never been a big player in the enterprise desktop application market.

If you disagree with my points, feel free to share your thoughts.