The desktop is dead. The browser and the mobile have killed it.

For years now, there has been a shift away from traditional desktop apps and native OS GUIs towards browser based interfaces for all applications, whether they’re personal/consumer apps, or enterprise apps.

Now, with the rise of very smart phones like iPhone, tablet devices, 3G internet available everywhere, and the coming of age of rich interactions in HTML with HTML5 and javascript, “ubiquitous computing” has finally arrived. People expect to be able to work on their applications from anywhere – from their desktop PC at work, or their laptop from home, or their iPad or iPhone or Blackberry when on the road. And the easiest way of ensuring that your app is available on all these platforms is to go with a “RIA” platform.

That’s what we’ll discuss this weekend on Saturday, November 27, at MCCIA Hall in ICC Towers on S.B. Road. We will talk about HTML5, and why it will take over the world. We will talk about how Javascript is the one language you cannot afford to not know, whether you’re talking about apps on your laptop or on your mobile phone. We will talk about Phonegap and Titanium, cross-platform platforms that allow you to write once using Javascript/HTML/CSS and run the app on desktops or mobiles alike. We’ll talk about Adobe’s offerings – AIR and Flash, and how they are the “incumbent” rulers of this space, and will not easily lose to HTML5. And we’ll talk about Microsoft’s Silverlight, and how that plans to break into this club.

The talk is free for all, and you must come, if you want to know what the world will be like for the next 3 years. You need to register at http://techweekend4.eventbrite.com. That page also contains the current list of speakers (which is being updated as we get more confirmations).

Yes, you, the people working on desktop frontend GUIs using java or .NET or VB or Qt – you are the ones who definitely need to come. Some might argue that desktop apps are certainly not dead – definitely not in enterprises. That is true, but only in the same sense as mainframes are still not dead in the enterprise, and COBOL is still not dead in the enterprise. But, for the forward-thinking, RIAs are the way to go, even when you are confined to the insides of your enterprise – just the expansion of that term will change to Rich Intranet Apps. That’s all.

Many thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring the venue for Techweekend. Microsoft wants to get more closely involved with the tech community in Pune, and particularly the open source enthusiasts – with the intention of making everybody aware that their cloud technologies (like Azure) actually play well with open source, and that you can deploy your php applications, your drupal/joomla installs on Azure.