I had the wonderful opportunity this weekend to attend the Northern Virginia Software Symposium “No Fluff; Just Stuff” Java and OpenSource conference in Reston, VA – a high-content technical conference that doesn’t waste time with marketing glop.
I walked away noticing several trends.
1) In a conference that’s designed around Java, security, and OpenSource technologies, Ruby got a lot of air time! It seems that Ruby on Rails for 80% of web applications can be 5 to 10 times faster than developing in Java, not to mention far more fun! Combine this with AJAX, the Prototype JavaScript framework, Scriptaculous, Rico, and Behaviour, and it’s possible to get some rich clients out of a web browser.
2) Apple laptops have arrived. Anyone who’s anyone has them now. The developers. The speakers. The audience. Not seeing Microsoft machines in a technical conference (remember, these people make the software you use) was an eye opener. A number of people had the new Macbook Pro, Apple’s Intel based processor, which, using Parallels, lets you run XP. Slap the desktop Virtue over that, and you can use both operating systems on the same machine concurrently.
3) Internet Explorer is bad. Worse than I ever thought. And not just from a security hole perspective. Everything. We’d learn something really cool and wonderful, and then we’d find out that IE didn’t do it, didn’t do it right, had a memory leak, or was non-standard. The more you look at web advancements, the more you wonder why people still use IE. It lacks features, it is problematic, and it renders web pages wrong. As such, if you use IE, you may be seeing Explorer Destroyer appearing more agressively – it puts FireFox in front of the user.
4) There seems to be a growing movement away from complexity. Frameworks and protocols that carry too much intellectual baggage are being replaced with simplier, smaller, less featured alternatives. I think we’re seeing abstractionism finally starting to collapse under it’s own weight.
5) Convention and consistency is winning out over configuration and flexablity. Standing back, trends go in circles. In BASIC, you need a dollar sign to tell the compiler a variable is string: A$. But, oh no, how awful, we have to use punctuation to hint to the compiler. Nay, let me say string A instead, and just use the variable I want. Now I can’t tell one type from the other, so I use prefixes: strHouseNumber. But what if my type changes? I should change my variable names, because int strHouseNumber is misleading. Finally, I need all this error handling in the event I do something wrong as a developer. Now I’ve got complex code and ugly variable names. The trend is coming full circle: do lots of automated testing, cut back on error handling code, script languages are actually powerful and fast enough, and if I stick a punctuation on a variable, I can read the type easier: A$