"These three things will conspire to be a perfect storm in our industry," Purdy said.

Mobile computing requires a back-end service to handle heavy processing. However, the user's devices are not always connected. As a result, some capabilities that used to reside on the server must be available on the local device, so that they can be used when the device is not connected to the Internet. The combination of HTML5 and JavaScript offers the capability to offload storage and processing to the device.

"Applications will shift from a very fat server model, where all the display logic is held on the server, to a much more thin server model where the display logic is in the browser itself," Purdy said. "Its communications with the server is with services and data."

Purdy's claim seems to get some backing from other parties who also see that Web application development is taking hold in the enterprise market. In a survey sponsored by Zend, a company that offers commercial support tools for the PHP Web programming language, 97 percent of 117 business and IT executives who said their organizations currently use PHP will use the Web programming language for additional applications in the future. Many cited the speed and flexibility of Web application development as a factor for choosing this approach over the more traditional approach of developing desktop applications.

The QCon conference runs through Wednesday.