Exciting Time for Developers Ahead

Millions of programmers around the world work diligently to

produce quality software that can ease the working of all the other computer

users. No wonder that different software vendors like to push their own

technology platform as the best in terms of developer productivity. The year

ahead promises to be exciting if you are a developer. There are many new

platforms available this year or waiting in the wings to be released soon that

will make software development interesting, challenging and fun.

The Microsoft stables



After a fairly long lull in the timeframe between major releases, Microsoft

has a ton of new stuff for developers ready. The first and the foremost are the

simultaneous releases of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005-that work on

completely new and improved .NET Framework 2.0. But this is just the tip of the

iceberg. Visual Studio Team System is a new offering from MS that enables

collaboration between large development teams even across geographies. Team

System also allows enhanced productivity by including developers, testers and

software and infrastructure architects to collaborate and work together on the

same product. What this means is that all software development can follow a

prescribed development methodology-architecting, development and testing

without resorting to un-integrated products to do the same.

Microsoft is also revamping the BizTalk Server line with

its new 2006 version. Many of the other servers such as MCMS are



expected to get complete facelifts as well.

And how about a new OS, browser and Office suite? Microsoft

plans to release Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 7 and Office 12, all within

the next year. The number of new technology platforms in WinVista alone is

enough to keep a programmer happy. To name a few-Windows Communication

Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, WinFS, WinFX, XAML, etc are some of

the new technologies within the upcoming version of Windows.

AJAX



For a very long time there has been a caste system in the development world.

System programmers have looked down upon desktop programmers who in turn look

down upon Web developers, based on complexity or kind of programming one does.

However, this year Web developers have got a boost in the

arm due to the emerging popularity of



AJAX



. It's a Web development methodology for creating interactive web apps. The

core components of



AJAX



are:

• XHTML for the actual display to the user (along with
  
  images, CSS, etc.)
  
  

• JavaScript for the client side interactivity with the
  
  internet browser's Document Object Model
  
  

• XMLHttpRequest-a technique of XML-RPC which allows
  
  client-side apps performing a Remote Procedure Call to a server using XML
  
  and retrieving the information back from the server in XML as well.
  
  

The main core of this is the last technology which was

introduced by Microsoft and used extensively in their own platforms such as

Outlook Web Access - Microsoft Exchange's Webmail interface. However, the

technology has taken off only after Google introduced the interactive GMail

interface. Seeing the Web page interact with the server and retrieve data

back-all without even refreshing the Web page was the impetus that

XMLHttpRequest and the associated technology required. Re-packaged as



AJAX



, many Web sites have sprung up offering this level of interactivity on Web

pages that mimics desktop functionality.Currently sites like Google Maps, MSN

Virtual Earth, Windows Live, Yahoo WebIM, etc.  all use this. Developers

can of course create these themselves using AJAX toolkits like Atlas for ASP.NET

2.0, Sajax and Guise to name a few.



AJAX



is the technology that will drive up the usage of live Web based services

rather than desktop applications.

Emergence of mobile platform



Today cellphone have become one of the most ubiquitous form of

communication. Apart from voice communications, cellphones concentrate on

features such as SMS, MMS and digital camera. This year has seen the cellhone

emerge as a complete platform for running applications that require Internet

connectivity.

For instance, cellphones have become an e-mail

communication client as well. Most modern mobiles have GPRS/EDGE/CDMA Internet

connectivity and mail clients that work with different e-mail servers. Push

technology is also available to push the e-mail to your device as soon as it

arrives in your mailbox.Now comes software development for cellphones.

Technologies like J2ME and Windows Mobile for PocketPC and Smartphones using

.NET Compact Framework allow developers to create applications for cellphones

that use the Internet as well. Another place that cellphones are gaining ground

is as on-the-field information gatherers/pushers. Using a mobile-compatible Web

application, users can browse for changing information on the field as well as

push the latest field-gathered data back to the central server-all using the

Web browser on their phones.

64-Bit computing



64-bit computing has finally taken off in the form of  servers,

desktops and notebooks. Of course, running 32-bit application on a 64-bit

platform does no justice to the power available. 64-bit programming requires

that you relearn a few key concepts from the 32-bit world. One of the

fundamental changes is that the sizes of primitive types such as integer and

long. In the 64-bit world, one can address a much higher amount of memory and be

able to optimize performance significantly.

Finale



As you can see, there are many development platforms newly available or

going to be available in the next year. All these



platforms also make development a much easier process-taking away much of the

dreariness associated with this job. Developers can then find time to improve

their own coding as well 'evolve' from being standard coders to architects

who are higher on the food chain.