Topic: Predictions

Prediction: The Teens will be the Decade of Mobile

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, January 11, 2010 @ 5:31 am

photo credit: matsuyuki

I've made my fair share of predictions, and this may seem to be a layup, but I think it's a prediction worth making anyway: mobile devices and applications will transform business and every day life in the next decade.

Why does this seem like such a layup? Well, look at the iPhone and the ecosystem of applications and companies springing up around it. Android and Blackberry are trying to jump in on the business and everybody and their brother is cooking up a connected mobile device. And yes, that's obvious. Mobile devices are going to increase in importance in 2010 and if you don't already have an iPhone app cooking to complement your other online channels, you're behind the times.

But if you're just thinking that more iPhone applications are going to be the end of it, you're in for a rude awakening. Businesses have just started consolidating after the disruptive years of the 90's and aught's, with the transformative effects of the web largely digested by the marketplace (the newspaper industry is still thrashing but will soon succumb). A new disruptive decade is dawning that may see the passing or fundamental transformation of industries as varied as telecom, credit card and broadcast television/cable. Prepare to take your business through a roller coaster ride every bit as challenging as the web revolution. Continue reading »

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User Experience Design

2009 Prediction – The End of Ajax

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, January 6, 2009 @ 4:00 pm

It has been a good run, but Ajax the buzzword will dip below the radar in 2009. That's not to say that we'll all stop writing JavaScript and using XHR in the coming year -- quite the contrary. Full 100% of web applications will incorporate Ajax technologies, we just will use the "Ajax" buzzword less and less, much as "HTML" became just another acronymic noun in the early days of the web. So that's not really controversial.

What's really going to happen in 2009 that will impact all of us RIA developers? The first raft of Ajax-enable webapps will be undergoing maintenance. Supportability is the real test of frameworks, architectures and designs. How easy are they to support? How painful is the life of a maintenance programmer working on a Dojo codebase versus a JQuery codebase?

We've been emphasizing the use of application level MVC frameworks here of late.Why? Because we feel that the best and most sustainable metaphor for RIA's is that of the desktop component GUI, not of the souped up webapp -- client/server making its triumphant return. Without this guiding principle -- that we are writing applications that consume backend services rather than backend services that display interfaces -- we face escalating development and maintenance costs.

I hope then to see two front end web development trends for the coming year:

1. Abstraction away from the underlying browser platform. Widgets, components, whatever you call them; the average front end web developer shouldn't have to tangle with the DOM or low-level browser events.
2. Adoption of application level MVC frameworks like PureMVC. A standard way of wiring up complex GUI's will save us from ourselves. See Swing for a cautionary tale of woe.

What are you predictions for the coming year?

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Software Development