Every now and then, Sun's Research group comes out with something that seems very interesting and leaves me wondering if this is the direction we might be heading in. It's difficult to describe Sun Labs Lively Kernel, so I'll simply quote from their website:
The Sun Labs Lively Kernel is a novel web programming environment developed by Project Flair at Sun Labs. The main goal of the Lively Kernel is to bring the same kind of simplicity, generality and flexibility to web programming that we have known in desktop programming for thirty years, but without the installation and upgrade hassles than conventional desktop applications have.
Remember all those rumors about how Google was developing an OS which would run in a browser? Well, this is the closest thing that I've seen to such a beast. When you visit the Sun Labs Lively Kernel page, click on the 'Enter Lively Kernel' tab to see the prototype in action. While performance was slow for me, it gives you a good idea of where we could be heading in the future.
Sun Labs Lively Kernel – http://research.sun.com/projects/lively/index.html