The 10 biggest events of the past 10 years
February 15, 2010 —
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The 10 events listed below were inflection points, but they don’t capture several trends that occurred without the benefit of a single, breakthrough event. The adoption of Web services and the replacement of SOA by REST was one trend that unrolled unspectacularly but inexorably. Likewise, AJAX, Web 2.0, and RIA (how the terms evolved!) are trends that are likely to shape programming in the future in profound ways. This will be especially true if the latest trend, cloud computing, becomes more widely accepted, as it will lead more apps to have Web interfaces.
No matter, how you look at these events and trends, it’s clear that the world of software development is far more complex and exciting today than it was 10 years ago.
1. Ant Released (2000)
Prior to Ant, there were numerous options for building applications. All of them—from make to autoconf—were horribly outdated. They required lots of knowledge to do anything more than trivial tasks, and they were marked by all kinds of odd peculiarities. With Ant, Java developers had a robust build system with numerous tasks predefined. Many tools have improved on Ant (Rake, Gradle, etc.), but all of them were possible because Ant pioneered the new direction.
2. .NET Shipped (2000)
Microsoft’s release of .NET was the company’s response to Java, and it showed that Redmond was still remarkably capable of embracing the breakthroughs of other vendors and extending them in new directions. .NET was fast, albeit not portable, and it supported multiple languages that could all interoperate. Moreover, .NET shipped with C# which took Java’s best syntactical features and added useful innovations. With .NET, Microsoft opened a new, highly successful chapter in its software development history.
3. Virtualization Emerged (2001)
VMware Workstation was a solution squarely aimed at developers: Run another OS on your current system and you can test portability with ease. It was clunky and very slow, but it worked. Developers at ISVs and large enterprises bought enough copies of Workstation that VMware was able to keep enhancing it until EMC saw its potential application in IT. The rest, as they say, is history.
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