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Re: Where is Software Development Heading in 2007?
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Posted: Jan 4, 2007 10:47 AM
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> Browser-based (Ajax) UI toolkits are rapidly gaining in
> quality and features, but so does Swing, and Swing still
> beats all the Ajax toolkits hands-down in every way,
> except in deployment. The resurgence of the applet maybe
> wishful thinking, but by the end of 2007, Swing will
> either gain its rightful place at the table of UI toolkits
> for Web-based apps, or it will recede into niche status.
> (I root for the first possibility.)
It was a decade ago when Sun introduced version 1.0 of the Servlet specification which gave software engineers the ability to create applications using just HTML and JavaScript.
As a sharp contrast to the network piping available then, today the broadband penetration rate is 80% among Internet users and the "YouTube" generation now gobbles significant bandwidth for entertainment. Meanwhile we continue to try to architect software that will fit within only a few bytes across the wire.
2007 will represent the year where software engineers begin to revisit their original assumptions about the web and recognize that in targeting software for the future it is prudent to explore thin rich clients such as applets and those delivered by Java Web Start which are more development and maintenance friendly than shoe-horning HTML and JavaScript into an application.
Perhaps with the advances in server virtualization, even solutions using technologies evolved from the original concepts behind VNC and X Windows may even begin to appear.
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