In this "look at the year ahead in the world of software" article, there are some interesting views on Ruby on Rails, AJAX, and the (predicted) future of the application and it's developers.
It's clear the there are differing opinions about all of these subjects, but the one thing that does come out is that there isn't a clear winner for development tools and platforms at the moment. I think it comes down to the strength of the implementation. Clearly, the richness of the interaction will come out on top of how you got there, provided bloat and irrelevant functionality aren't build at the expense of simplicity and usability.
Where's RIAs, AJAX, SOA and Virtualization Headed in 2008
— 2007 was the undoubtedly the year of Social Networking, but what of 2008? Will '08 be the year of 'Unified Communications' or the year when CMS comes to stand for 'Community Management System' - or even 'Collaboration Management System'? Or will it be the year of a giga-merger, to beat the mere mega-mergers of 2007? As usual at the end of each year, SYS-CON has been informally polling its globe-girdling network of software developers, industry executives, commentators, investors, writers, and editors. As always, the range and depth of their answers is fascinating, throwing light not just on where the industry is going but also how it's going to get there, why, because of who, within what kind of time-scale. Enjoy!
