The year was tumultuous

By Alan Zeichick

January 1, 2009 —

Writing in December about 2008, it’s hard to think of a better beginning than the macroeconomic climate. The causes of the world financial crises were many and the effects widespread. Software developers, as with all workers, are seeing uncertainty. While it’s true that many organizations are seeing software as a tool for reducing operational costs, that’s small consolation for a developer, tester, architect or manager who has just been laid off—or whose company has shut its doors.

We can all hope that the economy begins recovering soon, and that our laid-off colleagues find new employment.

Beyond the economy, there are five 2008 trends that we’ve chosen to highlight:

1. The increased profile of the cloud. One might credit Amazon.com for pushing cloud-based computing as an enterprise resource, but today it’s joined by companies as diverse as Google, Salesforce.com and Sun. The reasons are many for the increased popularity of the cloud. The affinity of cloud-based applications for service-oriented applications was immediately obvious, but so, too, is the lure of running applications with lots of CPU capacity, tons of bandwidth, terabytes of storage—without the overhead of running a data center.

2. The rise of smarter mobile devices. It’s more than just the iPhone, though Apple’s 3G-enabled device and its new App Store are the highest-profile progenitors of a new wave of handhelds. RIM’s BlackBerry, Google’s Android operating system, Mobile Internet Devices based on Moblin and the Intel Atom processor, and Windows CE-based smartphones are refining mobility. Soon, nearly every business worker will carry a large-screen device with WiFi and broadband wireless support, native applications, and a full-featured browser in his or her pocket. Executives are seeing the benefits of supporting those devices, both for their customers and employees. IT and software development teams must be ahead of this curve, not behind it.

3. The continuing maturation of agility. A few years ago, agility was a new concept. The Agile Manifesto and the first rock-star methodology, eXtreme Programming, took the world by storm. Today, agile software development is better known and better understood. There are few who argue against it, and most development teams try to embrace some form of agile development. The new flavor-of-the-day methodology is Scrum, and nobody talks about XP any more. There’s a lot more work to be done, but it’s clear that agile isn’t a flash in the pan. In today’s deliver-software-faster environment, many organizations will embrace agile development as a solution to business imperatives.

4. Platforms and tool providers continue to consolidate. Last February, Oracle snared BEA, kicking off a wave of consolidation (see p. xxx) across our industry. Since that time, the world has continued to bifurcate into two halves: the Microsoft universe and “everything else.” Despite Microsoft’s recent moves toward openness, there’s little reason to believe that 2009 will see any significant changes. Your companies and your teams will either be “Microsoft shops,” using Visual Studio and the Windows server stack … or they won’t be. However, thanks in part to the rise of mobile devices, continued issues with Windows Vista and skillful work by Apple, Redmond’s lock on the business desktop is weakening.

5. Rich Internet platforms are coming into their own. From Adobe AIR/Flex, to Microsoft Silverlight, to Sun’s JavaFX, to a range of smaller players, developers have a lot of choices in rich Internet platforms. We’re pleased to see that these offerings are generally cross-platform, even Silverlight, which runs on Firefox and the Mac. Will there be a winner? No, because as long as runtime clients remain free, developers can continue to pick the platform that’s best for their particular project, or which has the greatest synergy with their other applications.

Related Search Term(s): agile, cloud computing, embedded programs, Macintosh, Windows, Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, RIM, Salesforce, Sun

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From the Editors: Clouds in the rear-view mirror… and windshield Cloud computing became extremely popular this past year, and for good reason, as it offers affordability and flexibility. Also, the mouse and the GUI have not evolved much since ARC introduced them 40 years ago, and they could use an update.

Amazon adds Windows, Linux SLA into cloud service Non-Windows versions of Elastic Compute Cloud have been made available, while a Windows version has just gone into beta. Amazon has also added the ability to run SQL Server to the Web service.

Web up, SCO Down in 2007 Eleven big trends dominated 2007, including the growing clash between REST and WS-*, the disappointing showing of Windows Vista against Mac OS X, and Hewlett-Packard emerging as a dominant player in software test.

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