If you've developed for Microsoft's SharePoint before (I'm talking about 2007 here, but this applies to WSS2 and 2010 as well) , then you'll know that you can reach the limits of it's functionality very quickly. This is a big problem if you're making a zero-code solution, i.e. you have no access to Visual Studio and can't create web parts. This is more common than you'd think, especially in large organisations that use SharePoint extensively. For this, the only choice is to use SharePoint Designer 2007 (SPD), but it's not pleasant because, frankly, SPD sucks. I've not found a program that crashes as much as SPD, or that performs so poorly when presented with the most basic tasks. If you make a page that is too complex, has too many web parts, large data sources or lots of conditionals, connections and filters, it can take anywhere up to 20 minutes to perform a single action.
Well over a year ago, I wrote an article on the regulated rigidness that is Apple's product release cycle. I mapped out the next two years of Apple's product launches down to the month, and it has been the most viewed post on my blog for the entirety of last year, even eclipsing Smashing Mag calling my bookshelf "rough". nearly 40% of all page views were for that and over 80% of searches led to that page
Over the last few months I've been making a web site for my wedding. Emily (my fiancée) and I didn't want your run-of-the-mill wedding website, hosted by someone on an unrecognisable domain (for example, ewedding.com or gettingmarried.co.uk sub-domains). I wanted something that I had control over, that I could make as the perfect website for us, not a nice template that thousands of others have. We wanted something personal.
Web applications are the next big thing in the web. Being able to take web sites and make them run alongside native apps, having them work offline and perform just as well as their native counterparts is the next step along the road. As usual, with all new technology, there are some limitations.