This talk is about the history of apps and their stores (in both senses of the word), individually and collectively. It presents a vision of a world where apps are not silo’ed, are secure, are always local-first, always available and always up-to-date. Parts of this world have been described before, under the heading of “objects as software services”, but much of the history has never been shared before. A much simpler model of apps is possible by combining decades old technologies that have been largely neglected by the mainstream, including object capabilities, orthogonal persistence, dynamic software update and others. We’ll show you how that vision came about, how it failed, how it might be updated and made relevant today.

Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language and a well known researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. He was awarded the senior Dahl-Nygaard prize in 2017. He is currently a Technical Fellow at F5, and has held positions at Google, SAP Labs, Cadence, and Sun. He has authored or co-authored several books including the Java Language and Virtual Machine Specifications, and the Dart Programming Language. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk System. He received his B.Sc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.