AJAX Tipped To Play Major Role in the Shape of i-Technology to Come

2006 promises to be a vintage year for software development...

Jan. 22, 2006 05:30 AM

J P Morgenthal, managing partner for the IT consultancy Avorcor and the author of Enterprise Information Integration: A Pragmatic Approach, is as usual very forthright in his foresight:

J P MORGENTHAL: VPMNs, AJAX, VoIP Phones, SaaS, Semantic Technologies

1. Private mail networks: With people getting slammed I believe we will see the rise of VPMN (Virtual Private Mail Networks). Essentially, these are analogous to VPNs, allowing private network traffic run over the public backbone. They use common SMTP protocols to deliver mail, but unless you have permission to send mail to the recipient the mail will be rejected.

2. AJAX: We will see the rise of even stronger support for more powerful portable client-based applications based on Web protocols.

3. Composite Applications: With the rise of SOA and BPM, it’s going to get even easier to develop applications that require less low-level coding skills and which are more flexible and can respond faster to changes in business.

4.  VoIP Phones: Advancements and growth in high bandwidth wireless networking means that wireless devices will be IP addressable, which means that the next wave of phones will leverage the public Internet for phone communications and common WAN/LAN. Windows CE and Palm devices will be able to provide voice services. Gone are the days of buying a phone dedicated to a single network provider.

5.  Self-publishing: Garth Brooks & Wal-Mart, LuLu, MusikMafia. These names all represent a rise in successful self-publishing. Book, magazines, music are all media that are being self-published over the Internet. Soon, this will be expanding to software as Software as a Service (SaaS) becomes more popular.

6.  Metadata: Metadata is finally being recognized as a critical enterprise asset. It’s now being managed properly and leveraged for its properties for automation.

7.  Semantic Technologies: People and organizations are finally starting see the value in being able to describe data in context and defining the relationships between data. Semantic technologies enhance and extend the basic power realized by relational database technologies to data anywhere in the world.

ERIC NEWCOMER: Semantic Web, SOA, Standards, Open Source, AJAX

1. Several of us who have been saying for years that the Semantic Web has no commercial value will be proven wrong, although it still seems unlikely that technologies such as RDF and OWL-S will really do everything people think they will.

2. The distributed processing architecture for SOA infrastructure will gain adoption over the hub-and-spoke architecture, which is just too limiting and expensive compared to the more flexible and cost effective distributed approach.

3. The OASIS WS-Transactions specs will be completed during 2006 as stated in the WS-TX TC charter.

4. Customers will begin to push harder than ever for real software standards, in increasing recognition of the comparatively higher costs of doing business in a proprietary world.

5. The open source world will become recognized as a source of innovation, not just the commoditization of existing ideas. The open source world doesn’t suffer from the kind of organizational inertia that can inhibit innovation behind closed doors.

6. AJAX will become established as the solution for “browsers for SOA” but it will not solve the problem of how you access all the data still contained in legacy environments, which still need to be service enabled – with their mission critical qualities of service preserved.

Peter Zadrozny, StrongMail's CTO, naturally has some e-mail predictions:

PETER ZADROZNY: Spam/Phishing, AJAX, PHP, JEE, and SOA

1) E-mail will be re-engineered to stop spam and phishing, so it will help legitimate businesses better utilize the channel for secure communications such as statements, purchase orders, customer service, etc.

2) As part of the email re-engineering effort every sender will have to implement the authentication standards. Unfortunately, there will still be various authentication standards.

3) AJAX will be adopted like wildfire.

4) As PHP becomes more widely adopted as a highly productive, quick and dirty language, more and more people will realize that for serious enterprise grade, industrial strength applications they will have to use Java and JEE.

5) Service Oriented Architecture will continue its very slow and quite advance in the enterprise. A few years from now everything will be SOA and we will not remember how it happened.

Erik C. Thauvin, as befits the author of Erik's Linkblog and owner of Thauvin.net, ranged far and wide in his predictions. They started with combative opinions on RoR and Web 2.0:

ERIK C. THAUVIN: RoR, Web2.0, Open-Source Java, IE 7, Google, Yahoo!, spam, VoIP, and WiFi

1. Ruby (on Rails) and the such will still be touted as taking over Java, but in reality will be as insignificant as they are today.

2. Web 2.0 will solidify its status as a powerful buzzword. A lot of fluff, very little stuff.

3. Sun will once again dangle the open-source carrot as Mustang get closer to its release date.

4. The IE 7 rate of adoption will be phenomenal, especially compared to Firefox.

5. 60% of Google's services will still be in "beta".

6. Yahoo! will be the first Internet portal to come up with a compelling set of mobile-based services.

7. No spam salvation. Many will try, all will fail.

8. VoIP and Wi-Fi will become even more so synonymous.

Patrick Hynds, CoEditor-in-Chief of Information Storage & Security Journal and CTO of Critical Sites - who blogs here - noted that while he doesn't often venture to predict things, he does have enough experience "to hazard some guesses as to what this year will bring relative to the field of security."

PATRICK HYNDS: Rootkits, .NET 2.0, Terror Hacking

Here goes:

1. Security will continue to be a hot topic and will rise in the priority list of executive (finally) due to the public failures of some big names (still TBD).

2. Rootkits are already all the rage with the bad guys, 2006 will see the arrival of tools to combat them at the consumer level as spyware and anti-virus packages continue to awaken to this threat.

3 .NET 2.0 will help developers write more secure code than ever before, but we will continue to be our own worst enemy by subverting good systems with bad practices.

4. Brute force attacks will become more prolific and password security will take center stage once the code is deemed "secure enough."

5. We will likely see the first public case of terrorists using hacking to bring down a public utility (whether it is the Internet or the power grid)

"I went out on a limb with that last one," Hynds added, "as it hasn't happened yet (successfully) though I thought it was a good bet back in 2002. Security is a war, don't fight fair. You can be assured that the script kiddies, organized criminals and terrorists won't."

The CEO and Founder of "enterprise LAMP" specialist ActiveGrid, former Sun executive - and CTO of its AppServer division - Peter Yared, included Sun in his prediction as to how 2006 will unfold.

PETER YARED: AJAX, LAMP, RoR

"Since lightweight architecture is the best way to build rich AJAX applications that tie together services, 2006 will be the year of lightweight servers, whether it is LAMP, lightweight Java (Tomcat, Struts, Spring, Hibernate), Ruby on Rails, or a thinned down .NET. Sun is going to have to finally address both scripting and open source with Java, as more and more developers move from J2EE to scripting languages and lightweight servers."

Last word goes to Quest Software's Tyler Jewell, who has a thought-provoking speculation about Google...

TYLER JEWELL: Web 2.0, “GoogleNet”

“If you are going to be covering the Web 2.0 phenomenon, will you be highlighting the interesting moves that Google is making with buying up dark fiber, massive Internet bandwidths, and building prototype data centers that can be located at various points around the world? When you look at it all, it’s possible that Google is building a new Internet, a new ISP offering new services never before conceived of. It’s an interesting concept.”

So, let's be having your own contributions: mail them please to 2006predictions@sys-con.com.

Acknowledgments: Parts of this article were informed by discussions with SYS-CON editors, writers and columnists, including Sean Rhody, Israel Hilerio, Bill Ray, Mark Hinkle, Rob Gonda, and Dion Hinchliffe.

About Jeremy Geelan
Jeremy Geelan is Sr. Vice-President of SYS-CON Media & Events. He is Conference Chair of the all-new International Cloud Computing Expo series, of the International Virtualization Expo series, of AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo series, and of the long-running SOAWorld Conference & Expo series. He's founder of Cloud Computing Journal, Web 2.0 Journal, AJAX & RIA Journal and other leading SYS-CON titles. From 2000-6, as first editorial director and then group publisher of SYS-CON Media, he was responsible for the development of all new titles and i-Technology portals for the firm, and regularly represents SYS-CON at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of "Power Panels with Jeremy Geelan" on SYS-CON.TV.