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.
AJAXWorld - March 18-20, 2008, New York City The first one of the upcoming SYS-CON conferences is AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East, which will take place March 18-20, in New York City. Last year more than 70 companies sponsored it, including 3Tera, Addison-Wesley, Adobe, Apress, Backbase, Bindows, Conference Guru, Cynergy Systems, Dynamic Toolbar, Extension Media, Farata Systems, Flash Goddess, FrogLogic, GoingToMeet.com, Google, Helmi Technologies, IBM, ICEsoft, ILOG, IT Mill, Ittoolbox, JackBe, JetBrains, Kaazing, Krugle, Laszlo Systems, Lightstreamer, Manning Publications, Methods & Tools, Microsoft, Nexaweb, OpenSpot, OpSource, Oracle, Parasoft, Passport Corporation, PushToTest, Quasar Technologies, Rearden Commerce, Servoy, SmartClient / Isomorphic Software, SnapLogic, Sun Microsystems, TechTracker Media, Tele Atlas, The Thomson Corporation, ThinWire, TIBCO Software, TileStack, Universal Mind, Vertex Logic, Web Spiders, and Webtide.
About Jeremy Geelan Jeremy Geelan is Sr. Vice-President of SYS-CON Media & Events. He is Conference Chair of the all-new International Cloud Computing Expo series, of the International Virtualization Expo series, of AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo series, and of the long-running SOAWorld Conference & Expo series. He's founder of Cloud Computing Journal, Web 2.0 Journal, AJAX & RIA Journal and other leading SYS-CON titles. From 2000-6, as first editorial director and then group publisher of SYS-CON Media, he was responsible for the development of all new titles and i-Technology portals for the firm, and regularly represents SYS-CON at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of "Power Panels with Jeremy Geelan" on SYS-CON.TV.
The one technology that didn't even get mentioned in this list of "the next big things" and prognostications is rules engine technology. Rules engine technology is to "M" and and to some extent the "C" parts of MVC (which was mentioned in several ways) what the word processor is to writing and the database engine is to information storage and retrieval. The potential for "mashups" and the like is HUGE. Writing code with meta descriptions and code generators can only get you incremental improvements in productivity. Rules Engines can deliver (they have for us) order of magnitude productivity/reliability improvement. I guess they are still below the radar of the pundit prognosticators for 2008.
Trackback Added: Sarà il 2008 l'anno della "Unifed Communication"?; Nel mare magnum delle previsioni per l'anno nuovo segnalo (per il momento) queste pubblicate dal .NET Developers' Journal. Where's AJAX, SOA and Virtualization Headed in 2008? — 2007 was the undoubtedly the year of Social Networking, but what of 2008?
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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?
TIM BRAY
