Blane Warrene has an interesting new post over on his SitePoint blog about the future of machines and web applications.

Embedded systems have been around for quite a while. More recently, Linux has found to be friendly to the construction and deployment of embedded systems due to flexible licensing, low cost of entry and of course system stability.

In a roundabout way, a recent GNU GPL court victory points to what ultimately may become a mainstream market for web developers in coming years - web applications for an audience 'other' than the usual Internet/extranet/intranet user base.

It is an interesting idea to think about - how many of the future applicances/equipment will be web-enabled and how much of that will come from current web developers that know how to crank out scalable systems with small footprints that are conscious of system resources. With the flexibility that web applications offer (not only in terms of features, but also in the ease of interface creation), this sort of idea seems to be more and more of a possibility...