ProgressIve SessIons

Jonni Bidwell talks progressive web apps with Enonic’s co-founder Thomas Sigdestad.

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Thomas Sigdestad is CTO and co-founder of Enonic, a company that’s grown from humble beginnings in a garage in downtown Oslo to one of Norway’s most successful open source companies. It had the bold idea of providing people with something useful and usable during the dotcom boom, and that remains very much part of its strategy today. We caught up with him at the O’Reilly Software Architecture 2017 conference in London to talk about the future of cross-platform applications: progressive web apps. You may not have heard of them, but the chances are, if you’ve gone anywhere near a major website recently, that you’ve already used one.

New technologies enable web browsers to do all kinds of things – things that hitherto were strictly the preserve of native applications. This could mean many exciting developments: truly cross-platform applications, an end to the scourge of app stores, perhaps even Linux becoming a viable option for people bound by application requirements on proprietary OSes. A brave new world awaits, so read on…

Linux Format: Hi… Thomas Sigdestad: So, you’re the same people that made Amiga Format? I still remember looking forward to the disks and the first review of the latest game. It was pretty expensive in Norway though – £7 or £8 I guess.

LXF: That’s us… well, not us personally, but our company. I loved that mag though. My mum used to go mental that I’d spend £3 on a magazine. She didn’t understand the amazing value that represented. It wasn’t just the quality journalism – the cover disk was a big deal: 880K of PD games and demos that would keep me occupied for, well four weeks. Ahh, nostalgia, best not get me started. How did you get into Linux?