2007 was undoubtedly the year of Social Networking, but what of 2008?
Will '08 be the year of "Unified Communications" or the year when CMS
comes to stand for "Community Management System" - or even
"Collaboration Management System"? Or will it be the year of a giga-
merger, to beat the mere mega-mergers of 2007?
As usual at the end of each year, SYS-CON has been informally polling
its globe-girdling network of software developers, industry
executives, commentators, investors, writers, and editors. As always,
the range and depth of their answers is fascinating, throwing light
not just on where the industry is going but also how it's going to get
there, why, because of who, within what kind of time-scale.
Enjoy!
RIAs versus AJAX . Ruby on Rails . PHP . Facebook Competitors
TIM BRAY
Director of Web Technologies, Sun
Tim Bray managed the Oxford English Dictionary project at the
University of Waterloo in 1987-1989, co-founded Open Text Corporation
(Nasdaq:OTEX) in 1989, launched one of the first public web search
engines in 1995, co-invented XML 1.0 and co-edited "Namespaces in XML"
between 1996 and 1999, founded Antarctica Systems (antarctica.net) in
1999, and served as a Tim Berners-Lee appointee on the W3C Technical
Architecture Group in 2002-2004.
My predictions for 2008....
1. There's a major struggle going on between "RIAs" (Rich Internet
Applications) and AJAX, which tries to do everything in the browser
using just what the browser ships with. RIA frameworks are AIR
("Flash, the Next Generation"), Silverlight ("Microsoft wants in") and
JavaFX ("Isn't open-source better?") I'm not brave enough to predict
who wins, but I do predict that 2008 will be a crucial year; either
RIAs enter the mainstream, or they start to smell like a red herring
left in the sun.
2. The strain due to the fact that most business desktops are locked
into the Microsoft platform, at a time when both the Apple and GNU/
Linux alternatives are qualitatively safer, better, and cheaper to
operate, will start to become impossible to ignore.
3. Rails will continue to grow at a dizzying speed, and Ruby will in
consequence inevitably become one of the top two or three strategic
choices for software developers. But at the same time, other
frameworks and toolsets are learning its lessons, so Rails will get
some serious competition.
4. PHP will remain popular but its growth will slow, as people get
nervous about its maintainability and security stories.
5. There will be massive, newsworthy, churn in the social-networking
space, as Facebook creaks under the strain of its own size and growth,
and nimbler competitors find chinks in its armor.
See next pages for predictions from: Joshua Allen, Microsoft; Dr Adam
Kolawa, Parasoft; Eric Newcomer, IONA Technologies; Bill Roth, BEA
Systems; Brad Abrams, Microsoft; Kevin Hoffman, iPhone Developer's
Journal; Ian Thain, Sybase; Yakov Fain, Farata Systems.
HTML5 . Atom . MySpace & Facebook . Net Neutrality
JOSHUA ALLEN
Microsoft Senior Evangelist
Joshua Allen is a Senior Evangelist at Microsoft, helping large
consumer facing web sites adopt Microsoft's user experience
technologies. In 9 years at Microsoft, he's shipped several products
including APIs for XML and services for MSN, as well as worked with
many of the large web sites during the first dot-com era.
1. Web standards will matter more than ever, as more development
shifts to the web: HTML5 will eclipse XHTML. Atom Publishing Protocol
will emerge as a key component of the programmable web, as will Simple
Sharing Extensions (SSE). Interest in using pure web standards for
mobile development will increase, and will become more practical by
the end of 2008.
2. MySpace and Facebook will remain the dominant social networking
sites. All social networking sites will have platforms, but interop
will be spotty as the players compete to "value-add" services beyond
the interop profile.
3. Ad agencies will be more important, not less, by end of 2008.
4. Disparity between bandwidth haves and have-nots will grow. Net
neutrality will take an even worse beating in 2008 than 2007.
See next pages for predictions from: Dr Adam Kolawa, Parasoft; Eric
Newcomer, IONA Technologies; Bill Roth, BEA Systems; Brad Abrams,
Microsoft; Kevin Hoffman, iPhone Developer's Journal; Ian Thain,
Sybase; Yakov Fain, Farata Systems.
Managing web services . Governance . Web service servers . BPEL
DR ADAM KOLAWA
CEO & Co-Founder, Parasoft
Considered to be a visionary in his field, Dr Kolawa's years of
experience with various software development processes has resulted in
his unique insight into the high-tech industry and the uncanny ability
to successfully identify technology trends. As a result, he has
orchestrated the development of numerous successful commercial
software products to meet growing industry needs to improve software
quality - often before the trends have been widely accepted. Kolawa
has been granted ten patents for the technologies behind these
innovative products.
1. I expect that the industry will recognize that managing web
services is much more complicated than initially anticipated. People
are finding that the systems being built nowadays are strangely
interconnected to the rest of the world... and every time they touch
those systems, something else is impacted. I predict that this will
lead to growing interest in web service governance.
2. As more and more people expose their existing systems as web
service servers, I think we will see a lot of situations where service
consumers try to use these applications in ways that the original
designers did not anticipate. This is a classic case of missing
requirements and miscommunication. I expect that this will also lead
to tighter governance.
3. I think that BPEL will continue to advance and people will find new
applications for BPEL. Eventually, it will sink in that:
* Anything can be a web service
* Everything is a business process.
See next pages for predictions from: Eric Newcomer, IONA Technologies;
Bill Roth, BEA Systems; Brad Abrams, Microsoft; Kevin Hoffman, iPhone
Developer's Journal; Ian Thain, Sybase; Yakov Fain, Farata Systems.
The reinvention of enterprise software. Java market fragmentation .
OSGi bundles . Microkernel-based architectures
ERIC NEWCOMER
CTO, Iona Technologies
Eric Newcomer leads IONA's participation in all standardization
activities, and has been involved in Web services standardization
activities from the beginning. As Chief Technology Officer he is
responsible for directing and communicating IONA's technology roadmap,
as well as its product strategy as it relates to standards adoption,
architecture, and product design.
1. The large Internet businesses will become a big inspiration for
enterprise software innovation as software vendors start to develop
products based on requirements from Google, eBay, Amazon, PayPal, et
al. This trend will result in the reinvention of enterprise software,
and during 2008 this trend will become clear. The traditional
middleware products such as J2EE application servers and relational
database management systems were developed to handle the load of any
business. But the Internet load is much greater than this, as are the
requirements to be always available. The old centralized, mainframe
based software designs are being rethought, using the cheapest
computers and disks possible to achieve the highest possible levels of
scalability, performance, and reliability. During 2008 what is
happening here will become generally understood.
2. In the Java market fragmentation will increase rather than lessen.
The recent split between JBI and SCA, and the disagreements over Java
EE 6 and OSGi will escalate tensions as the pressure increases on BEA/
Oracle, IBM, and Sun to take market share from each other in a
diminishing market. Meanwhile, Microsoft has an opportunity to grow
stronger behind the leadership of Ray Ozzie and is likely to surprise
those who believe the battle for the enterprise is over and Java has
already won.
3. Specifications and reference implementations for the enterprise
edition of OSGi software will be completed, laying the foundation for
the most significant change in the Java market since the emergence of
the Spring Framework, although Sun is likely to continue to oppose it.
J2EE application servers will finally become more modularized (buy
only what you need) and Java developers will be able to think about
enterprise applications in terms of a combination of OSGi bundles,
some developed by the user and others supplied by vendors - all of
which work seamlessly together and support dynamic deployment and
update capabilities.
4. Resource oriented computing, aka REST, will finally start to gain
serious traction (see also No. 1), although its rabid adherents won't
be satisfied with what will be less than total domination (yes
Virginia, people will still be using Web services, too). Vendor and
user support is on the rise, and more and more people will understand
how to take advantage of this powerful architecture. Enterprise
applications will start to include both service oriented and resource
oriented capabilities. OSGi based infrastructures (see also No. 3)
will help the Java world combine both sensibly.
5. Microkernel-based architectures and lightweight containers will
grow in popularity as people gain experience with SOA based project
design, development, and deployment and understand the benefits of
"just the right amount of software for an SOA." SOA deployment
strategies based on grid and virtualization technologies will also
become widely adopted, since lightweight containers lend are well
suited to them, although the industry will continue to fight over the
definition of "grid" since Oracle and IBM have widely divergent
approaches.
6. The battle for social networking prominence will be played out in
2008 as MySpace, Facebook, Plaxo, and LinkedIn position themselves for
enterprise use. As the "IM generation" enters the workforce they are
going to expect in the corporate environment support for familiar
social networking technologies, encouraging corporations to figure out
how to incorporate them into business culture, but one or perhaps two
winners will emerge from the battle in 2008. Meanwhile expect
employees to hedge their bets by taking out pages on multiple sites,
causing confusion in the short term over which site to favor. .
See next pages for predictions from: Bill Roth, BEA Systems; Brad
Abrams, Microsoft; Kevin Hoffman, iPhone Developer's Journal; Ian
Thain, Sybase; Yakov Fain, Farata Systems.
Semantics . Event-Driven Programming . AJAX Consolidation . Flex vs
AJAX
BILL ROTH
Vice-President, BEA
Bill Roth is a member of the editorial boards of both Java Developer's
Journal and WLDJ. He is Vice President of the BEA Workshop Business
Unit. Prior to this he was Chief Technical Evangelist for Epiphany.
With over 19 years in this industry, he has played numerous product
marketing, product management and engineering roles at companies like
Sun and Morgan Stanley.
In my view i-Technology is heading in a few discernable directions:
1. Semantics: The next quantum leap in computing will be in the
area of annotating information with additional meaning, i.e.
semantics. Tim Berners-Lee saw this in 1999 when he wrote about The
Semantic Web. The idea is that if you augment data with additional
information that allows a computer to determine what it actually
means, you will be able to do more with that data, and be able to take
more human processing out of the loop. Semantics is not a new topic.
Researchers in the 1960's made their first stab at it. But with the
advent of RDF and OWL we may be able to achieve the first tangible
(and commercializable) improvements in computing.
2. Less coding: The essential productivity of the programmer has
not improved in 25 years. The fact remains that it is still difficult
to write code. As a result, more and more systems will become
available which make it possible to build application with less and
less code. Meta-data driven development will also start taking hold in
the next 12 months.
3. More programming paradigms, like Event Driven: Because of #2,
more fit for purpose programming paradigms will emerge. The most
likely candidate in this area is "event driven" programming, a mélange
of declarative and rule-based concepts for building our application in
what Gartner calls Event-Driven Architecture.
4. Consolidation of AJAX models: There seem to be hundreds of
AJAX programming models, both open source to commercial. The coming 12
months will see a consolidation to 4 or 5 models. No one model will
become dominant yet. Furthermore, since the browsers were never really
designed to solve the RIA problem, there's a good chance that
alternative models like Flex, Silverlight, etc will make a serious
challenge to the AJAX models.
5. Flex as an alternative to AJAX: While AJAX has hundreds of
models, Flex has but one. Built on the widely deployed Flash
technology, Flex has easy to use tools and a powerful scripting model
that allow amazing things to be built. The simplicity and deployment
of this model will prove to be very compelling in the enterprise in
the next 12 months, and will make Flex a serious rival to all of the
AJAX options. (Disclosure: I shamelessly admit I am a huge fan of
Flex.)
See next pages for predictions from: Brad Abrams, Microsoft; Kevin
Hoffman, iPhone Developer's Journal; Ian Thain, Sybase; Yakov Fain,
Farata Systems.
Enterprise UX . Software Testability . Companion Applications
BRAD ABRAMS
Group Program Manager, Microsoft
Brad Abrams was a founding member of both the Common Language Runtime,
and .NET Framework teams at Microsoft where he is currently the Group
Program Manager for the UI Framework and Services team which is
responsible for delivering the developer platform that spans both
clients and web based applications as well as the common services that
are available to all applications. Specific technologies owned by this
team include ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX, parts of Silverlight, and
Windows Forms.
1. User Experience Reaches the Enterprise. In 2008 we will see several
major enterprises start efforts to build UX centric applications that
increase worker productivity, reduced transaction costs and increase
pull through as the UX meme of the consumer facing world leaks into
the enterprise. The days of the battleship gray, forms of data
application as the king of the enterprise are numbered because of an
imperative towards richer visualization of complex and interconnected
data. While there will always be a need for the traditional sort of
application, by the end of 2008, it is no longer the only element of
the corporate landscape.
2. Testability Becomes a Requirement for Software Development
Frameworks. No longer satisfied with simple reductions in costs for
initial development, a growing community demand frameworks and tools
that facilitate sustainable and agile practices. 2008 is the year that
frameworks and tools take notice and start to deliver solutions that
are testable out of the box. Technologies such as Test Driven
Development, MVC/MVP patterns, and frameworks that support moching
become mainstream. After seeing this year's cool demos at software
development industry conferences a common question will be: "...And
how do you test that?" Let's hope the presenters have an answer.
3. The Companion Applications Become Practical. While RIA and AJAX
application categories continue to grow, many consumer facing web
applications and enterprise applications developers realize there is a
need for desktop exploitive applications as well as reach web
applications that work everywhere. What meaningful application
wouldn't benefit from a pairing like that of Outlook and Outlook Web
Access? In the past it has been prohibitively expensive to build these
applications, but with the circa 2008 technology such as .NET
Framework 3.5 and Silverlight, it is finally becoming practical to
have a single codebase that fully exploits the desktop and offers a
rich web experience.
See next pages for predictions from: Kevin Hoffman, iPhone Developer's
Journal; Ian Thain, Sybase; Yakov Fain, Farata Systems.
Apple Tablet . G-Phone . Social networking. MVC
KEVIN HOFFMAN
Editor-in-Chief, iPhone Developer's Journal
Kevin Hoffman, editor-in-chief of SYS-CON's iPhone Developer's Journal
is coauthor of Professional .NET Framework (Wrox Press) and co-author
with Robert Foster of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Development Unleashed.
Here are my predictions, in no particular order:
1. Apple will release a Tablet that runs a variant of Leopard. When
people touch it, they will spontaneously combust with joy.
2. Google's Halo will burst and finally people will stop worshipping
them. That won't decrease their stranglehold on search and online ads,
however. Their open phone platform will have only niche-sized
popularity.
3. Visual Studio 2008 / .NET Framework 3.5 will remain highly
underrated until late 2008 when people finally figure out that they're
sitting on a gold mine of new technology.
4. Social networking bubble will burst. Hopefully this will thin the
herd and get rid of the annoying Web 2.0 detritus clogging the way for
the real innovators.
5. MVC. MVC. MVC. This is where web development belongs. Ruby/Rails
will gain in popularity, as will every other MVC framework for web
development, especially the one being hinted at by Microsoft. The
number of available framework choices for developers to build high-end
web applications will be larger than ever before.
6. Vista's service pack will go over like a lead brick.
See next pages for predictions from: Ian Thain, Sybase; Yakov Fain,
Farata Systems.
Windows Mobile OS . Innovative Handsets . Mobile-Oriented Architecture
(MOA) . Mobility Development
IAN THAIN
Senior Technology Evangelist, Sybase
Ian is very involved with the design, production and testing of
Enterprise class UnWired Solutions, that have been implemented using
Sybase's UnWired tools for Sybase customers around the globe. He has
experience of working with the ITSG engineering teams, in particular
on the EAServer, EP, PowerBuilder, PocketBuilder, PowerJ & OEM
products.
Here's what I believe will occur over the next year...
1. I expect to see Microsoft consolidate and strengthen its hold on
the Enterprise Mobile space with its Windows Mobile OS. This will be
in the areas of OS features and security.
2. Along with this, I believe that our partner HTC will continue to
grow its handset market share, with more new models available. If
evolution is constant, I expect to see handsets with more innovative
design and features and I'm expecting HTC devices to gain more memory
for storage and especially for the running of the OS and user
programs.
3. Mobility (MOA) will become more important on the fringes of SOA For
Sybase, the UnWired Enterprise company, this is a win-win situation as
our wide spectrum of products covers the broad area of mobility
development. I expect to see our competitive products grow along with
these predictions and in areas ahead of them. In fact I can see
mobility development coming into the mainstream development fold, just
as web development started off as a separate group and has now become
one, in most companies. Having this strong development offering from a
unified company will be seen as such a positive step by most if not
all undertaking Enterprise Mobility Development.
See next page for predictions from: Yakov Fain, Farata Systems.
Flash Player. Ruby on Rails. Outsourcing . Adobe Flex & AIR
YAKOV FAIN
Editor-in-chief of Flex Developer's Journal
Yakov Fain, editor-in-chief of Flex Developer's Journal (http://
flex.sys-con.com), is a managing principal of Farata Systems,
consulting, training and product company. He has authored several Java
books, dozens of technical articles. SYS-CON Books released his latest
book, "Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of
the Masters" in Spring 2007
What's the next big thing in IT? In my opinion...
1. Java will remain strong in large enterprises, but will continue
losing ground as a development platform for small businesses. J2EE is
way too heavy, and scripting languages and frameworks offer an
alternative and productive way of software development when the cost
of development is more important than performance and scalability. The
LAMP platform will remain a preferable way to develop applications for
small to medium businesses.
2. AJAX popularity may go downhill. Since the first day this acronym
was created I've been writing that it's not a good choice for
developing enterprise applications. But the vast majority of the
software world was (and still is) marching the AJAX way. This time
it's more of a hope than a prediction that in 2008 people will realize
that AJAX should serve the same goal as JavaScript - making your Web
pages a little prettier. Expect to see the re-branding of some of the
AJAX frameworks into RIA or Web 2.0 solutions.
3. Speaking of Web 2.0... Even though Web 2.0 was not officially
defined, I think it's all about giving more control to the users of
the Web sites. The more interactive a Web site is, the higher the
number people will put in front of the zero - 3.0, 4.0, and so on.
Some people say that Web 3.0 is about Semantic Web. If you bought a
grill on Amazon.com, they can guess with high probability that you
might be shopping for rib-eye steaks. Check it out the next time you
visit the site. It's all about control. From the user's side and from
the vendor's side. We'll see more and more interactive sites next
year. While some people are planning to write next-generation
sophisticated software, others will come up with a very simple, easy-
to-implement but appealing business idea, and the next 20-year
billionaire is born.
4. Flash Player will remain the best deployment platform for rich
Internet applications. While Microsoft is trying to come up with a
competitive delivering platform for RIA, it's not going to happen in
2008. Silverlight 1.0 is a good start, the next version (1.1) will be
even better, but it'll take time to release a product that can do more
than streaming multimedia.
5. Ruby on Rails will take a small share of the market of small non-
mission-critical Web applications. Convention over configuration.
Speed of development over performance. While Ruby on Rails will not
become a framework of choice, it has achieved a very positive result -
people have started to realize that not every project has to be
developed in either Java or .NET. Besides, RoR is a well-designed
framework that will become a good design sample for the new frameworks
of the future.
6. Internet video will be booming and I'm not talking about YouTube.
Internet Video will start being a part of a number of enterprise
applications. This process won't be fast, and you have an opportunity
to be among the early adopters in this sector.
7. Outsourcing will gain more and more ground despite the fact that
it's very expensive and the project failure rate is high. The reason
is that the U.S. has almost stopped producing software engineers. It's
just a matter of time before everyone gets used to the fact that
business software is made in India, just like we all know that all
toys (with or without lead) are made in China. But innovation in
software will still be happening in America. I guess, there's
something in the air here. Re-read an old but valid article by Paul
Graham about why Silicon Valley can't be exported.
8. Apple - next year I'll finally purchase a MacBook Pro for myself...
if my Sony Vaio will die. Even if it won't die, having a two-year-old
machine is a good excuse for submitting a purchase order to my wife
for approval. Peer pressure, a cool design and the ability to run
Windows (plan B),will force me to ignore the high price.
9. Adobe Flex and AIR - Flex will become the #1 tool for developing
enterprise rich Internet applications, and I'll be seeing 10% fewer
raised hands when asking an audience, "Raise your hand if you do not
know what Flex is?" Adobe AIR's adoption will be slow though. Or
course, the shops that are already sold on Flex will use it, and some
AJAX developers will realize that it may become a lifesaver for their
applications, but that's about it. While being a well-designed and
very promising technology (Flex, Flash Player, HTML, JavaScript, PDF,
SQLLite DBMS, an ability to work in a disconnected mode, and full
access to your PC's resources), it may be perceived as yet another
Web browser, which is a tough sell in the enterprises. At least,
become an early adopter. I will.
10. Telephony. If 2007 was the year of Skype, we'll see some
interesting development in this area. Skype is a great product, but it
requires you to download and install software. In the era of RIA,
things can be done without it. Watch the Ribbit phone software that
will allow you to make calls and receive e-mails just from your Web
browser.
11. IT job market in the USA. While we've enjoyed a stable demand for
IT professionals in 2007, it won't last and next year we'll see
project freezes and even layoffs. The reason is the burst of the real
estate bubble. This will affect not only those simple people who were
brainwashed and decided that they could have afforded an American
dream. CEOs of major Wall Street corporations are being fired after
drowning their companies by getting into bad mortgage debt. Among
other things, the IT budget will be severely cut. As you know, today
on Wall Street, is tomorrow on Main street. Use the training budget of
your employer now if it's not too late. Keep your skills up to date.
12. The hottest IT skills of 2008. When the job market is tight,
recruiters immediately increase the list of skill requirements for job
opennings. You'll see job postings that expect you to know a number of
programming languages ranging from Cobol to C++. Knowing just one hot
tool does not cut it anymore. But if you have limited time and need
money, start by learning tools for developing rich Internet
applications. The skillset of a highly paid Web developer, at a
minimum, has to include the following skills: HTML,CSS, JavaScript,
J2EE or.NET, Flex or Silverlight, AJAX, and good communication skills.
You do not have to really learn AJAX, but must add AJAX keyword to
your resume, otherwise you may not even get a job interview.
13. The next big thing. Software development will change to a wider
use of code generators. Forget about heavy frameworks, regardless of
what programming language you use. In a simple case, use some XML
style sheets combined with the metadata that describes your
application objects to automatically generate the code for these
objects. On a larger scale, the entire application may be described
using metadata and XML, and an appropriate code generator will do the
job. So programming will change from writing tedious code that
requires lots of coders to describing the metadata and writing custom
code generators.
Happy New Year!
See previous pages for predictions from: Tim Bray, Sun; Dr Adam
Kolawa, Parasoft; Eric Newcomer, IONA Technologies; Bill Roth, BEA
Systems; Brad Abrams, Microsoft; Kevin Hoffman, iPhone Developer's
Journal; Ian Thain, Sybase; Yakov Fain, Farata Systems.
(c) 2008 SYS-CON Media Inc.
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