Today's keynote is about trends that developers across platforms and languages will face. None of these should be big surprise if you keep up to date and "read the internet". Presented by the VP of Technology at dzone.com.
- The Rise of Agile and Lean
- Majority of developers report using Agile, but it means different things to different people – i.e. using Scrum, User Stories, etc.
- Agile is a hot topic at DZone, so there's an audience looking for help and information on using it.
- Noticed a rise in consultants and software claiming to help implement Agile.
- People with small teams/enterpreneurs are the ones practicing agile. Hasn't broken into "the Enterprise".
- But, does Agile lead to better software? Do more frequent releases mean we hit schedules, are more secure, and solve user problems?
- More frequent releases DO cut down on having to explain stuff to clients, because you can show them stuff.
- Switch to Standards based Browsers
- Chrome has had tremendous growth, particularly with technical audience.
- Windows developers are switching quickly to IE8.
- Overall developer population is still largely on Microsoft. But those developers don't go to conferences?
- Everyone needs to know Ajax/Javascript
- Back end developers need to understand the user interface too.
- Should learn at least on framework such as jQuery or Prototype
- Understand how ajax works, and its data transports like JSON, XML.
- Focus on Security
- Vulnerabilities get more and more media coverage.
- Are there more security holes or are attackers getting smarter.
- XSS, SQL Injection, weak passwords, etc…
- Can't assume your framework takes care of all security.
- Give equal time to security audits of your code. Think about security when you're developing.
- Rich User Interfaces
- Users expect much more dynamic interfaces, even if they prefer style over substance.
- Lots of options for RIA – Flash, Silverlight, Flex, Ajax, HTML5
- Must RIAs run outside the browser?
- it can run on the desktop – what opportunities does this create?
- Benefits of RIA vs. normal website?
- Mobile and other UI Form Factors
- Can't presume that everyone has a mouse. Link targets will have to get larger, more touch friendly.
- Different platforms have touch interfaces that behave differently.
- Supporting multiple platforms will be a point of pain.
- But users expect application to just work.
- Death of Relational Databases
- Can mean different things to different people.
- Data store that is focused on horizontal scaling, massive data, and lookups based on primary keys.
- Large Web 2.0 sites are moving to NoSQL – Digg, Twitter, Reddit
- But relational databases are not going away any time soon.
- Most developers are fie on RDMS. Few need to Scale at this level or deal with massive data storage.
- Not all queries convert easily.
- NoSQL data stores very common on the cloud – App Engine, Amazon SimpleDB
- Distributed Version Control
- Many choices emerged – Git, Mercurial, Baazar
- Git seems to have most momentum
- Adoption driven by Open Source
- Does anyone still use CVS?
- Subversion still big, driven by tool support. Its entrenched in the enterprise because the IDE's have good support built in.
- Distributed VCS encourages outside participation.
- Cloud Computing
- What does the term really mean?
- non-root access on someone else's hosting platform (ie my blog is on wordpress.com)
- or virtual servers with root access that can be easily replicated.
- Lot of "Cloud" platforms – App Engine, Azure, VMForce, hosting companies, etc…
- Hand-in-hand with NoSQL
- Most apps don't need that kind of scalability
- Complex systems require more management and automation.
- Is it worth rewriting our application to run in the cloud.
- What does the term really mean?
- Rise of Interpreted Languages
- Ruby, Python, Clojure, Scala, Groovy
- New languages to solve new problems
- Better support for the cloud
- Take advantage of multiple cores and parallel processing.
- Often early takers of NoSQL
- Is the JVM empowering language developers?