Websites are becoming more application-like, with many using AJAX to make requests of the server and PHP or some other server-side language to process those requests. This seems to be getting closed to the event-driven programming model used in Visual Studio and various windowing frameworks.

Ultimately, what I hope this will converge on is a truly event-driven model, where events triggered on the client are mapped directly to server-side functions that perform processing and return their results directly back to the client-side. Rather than explicitly sending out an AJAX request and catching a response in a callback, this would then use simple functional notation and the backend processing would happen behind-the-scenes, similar to how RPC works (come to think of it, that’s sort of how “web services” worked too, but I guess those are just glorified RPC when it comes down to it). It would be as simple as Qt’s “signals” and “slots”.