Software application development

A quick glance across the developer agenda for the next couple of months sees a number of our industry favourites hosting the European versions of some of the events and meetings that have been staged stateside this summer.

This got me thinking – I used to be involved with an Australian developer magazine (which was so named) at the time of us needing to change the title to “International” so that we could sell it outside the grand shores of Oz. The feedback from the Aussie development community was not on the whole positive I can tell you - they didn’t want international, they wanted Australian.

So if vendors stage their events on both sides of the pond – is the content any different?

Of course if it’s a straight repeat of a previous event, then at least attendees in the home country in question get to attend without international travel. So that’s good. There’s also the language barrier to consider I guess.

But if they just replace local country spokespeople and run the same event – should we pay attention? Especially if there is plenty of web reportage out there from press who have attended the US events.

I spoke to Microsoft Australia’s head of development Frank Arrigo (who has since switched to Redmond) about these issues a while back and he said that while development should always be international that there were pockets where specialised areas of focus have been brought to bear.

His example for Oz was that much of the Vista testing had gone on down under as it was a nicely ‘separated’ microcosm of development professionals who used English as their first language and knew what they were doing.

While we like to look at British and European generated developments and stories in our home market – I wonder just how international we consider our own outlook to be on the industry?

Ask an outsourcer – and you know what answer you’ll get. Ask an Australian and you may get a different opinion, but not always. Ask a development professional from the sub-continent and they’ll probably want to be as international as possible. Ask an American or a Brit and your guess is as good as mine. At the risk of stereotyping, I’ll stop there.

I’m off to Brighton next month to attend a web development symposium with a large software company famous for producing a popular operating system beginning with W.

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This is good news as far as I am concerned. Having recently worked on some projects with a pal of mine who edits a magazine for web designers, I am currently trying to analyse the connection points between developers and designers in this space as they are brought together to use common toolsets.

Version control and/or change management is a case in point; vendors in this space, it seems to me, are keen to extol the virtues of a system of code control when it comes to web development – especially when sites themselves are becoming as complex as offline applications in some cases.

So as web design and web code development increasingly coalesce, will a new undercurrent be felt in terms of web-facing customer relationship management (CRM)?

What I mean is, will sites not just look more slick and attractive and exhibit all forms of ‘stickiness’ – but will that customer awareness and CRM cognisance be reflected in the code that drives the site? When the home page smiles at you, will it really mean it?

Clearly we’re talking way beyond remembering passwords and cookies – we’re talking about CRM that affects the way sites perform depending on your behaviour. Perhaps not quite artificial intelligence for the web, but at least a new level of fine tuning akin to switching your car into a sports gearbox ratio, or indeed back to economy drive.

Next month’s event has a session I plan to attend entitled, “Becoming human; smiling like you mean it, and learning to say hello
,” to be presented by Denise Wilton, creative director of Moo.com – and quite apart from loving their business cards, I am intrigued.

“The Internet is changing the way smart companies sell to their customers. The traditional tones of corporate ad-speak sound lofty and unapproachable online – especially when the rest of the residents are talking with human hearts and voices,” says her promotional blurb with a suggestion to me that there are new construction parameters afoot to be discussed as we now have an oh-so very different Internet.

If the world of web 2.0 if going to continue to change the way the web is designed and built in the way it already has, then perhaps a more subtle infrastructural refresh could be on the cards. Maybe we’ll move from bricks and mortar web constructs to, in some cases, more disposable pre-fab builds for short term housing needs. Perhaps we’ll be sinking deeper foundations in some cases.

Smile like you mean it then. The web is going to have to do this I feel. We’ve become too web-savvy and too jaded by promotional pop-up windows to fall for anything but a new paradigm in site behaviour and this can surely only be achieved by new build methods for site development.

“I think up to now web 2.0 has been more about understanding new technologies and tools for spreading an online message”, says Web Designer editor Mark Billen. “If we’re now asking bigger questions about the language we use to communicate with audiences via these channels then that can only be a good thing – it’s only natural that people grow cynical of the old methods.”

As for a long-term prediction - I use a DVD service called RedBox which has a great online presence that emulates the kiosk interfaces you have to visit to physically pick up your movies. Researching your movie online is just like being stood at the kiosk – a bit better actually as you can watch trailers and other cool stuff. So as we get more and more used to great online experiences, perhaps shops will have to emulate our web shopping world. I’m sure someone will tell me that this is already happening – so what’s the score?

With PDC on the rapidly approaching horizon there is already talk of ‘how to prepare for the development road ahead’ – and discussion around ‘Oslo’, Microsoft’s “family” of technologies for data-driven development and execution of services finally seems to have started bubbling up after being announced way back in Oct 07. Even the partner expo section this year is modestly titled “Amazing Scenarios”, gosh!

With futurology in mind, it will be interesting to see just how far the pontificating is going to go this year as a number of vendors are starting to become more vocal on the subject of applications with “gestural” (is that a real word yet?) interfaces a la Tom Cruise in Minority Report.

At the risk of ‘over-engineering’ the applications themselves as vendors insist that a double-click on a mouse just isn’t an intuitive enough experience for us, there is momentum for development in this space. Microsoft has MS Surface and Apple has the iPhone and the MultiTouchPad on the MacBook Pro – Nintendo’s Wii too of course.

The problem may be that this type of technology is great for keynote speeches and press releases, but if your development world is built around a really intelligent payroll application that is so robustly constructed that it’s being used in secure environments from the military to the public sector – do you really care about this cutting edge stuff that may never see the light of day other than on a phone or in a game?

In search of an engineering epiphany on this subject I found this info from a creative digital agency called AKQA that says the following:

“The main consideration for developers is that the interaction model does not lend itself to current thinking and development methodologies. Developing a gestural interface requires more than simply taking an existing application and trying to port it across. Instead, gestural interface developers will need to stop, forget the old practices, and start thinking in a completely new way. If an application is developed using this mindset, the rewards will be great.”

OK good, so it’s a back to ground level approach that’s required, no major surprise there though. I don’t think application developers need to worry about keyboards suddenly going right out of fashion though do you?

I’d like to suggest that the most important point here (and this is also a point made by the AKQA team) might perhaps be hinged around standards. What I mean is; how do we prescribe and detail the double-click standard for the future? These kind of building blocks will need to be agreed upon if we are to go forward in this space.

Futurologists may suggest that everything will be so intuitive that we won’t need standards, but that may just distance these applications from the developers who already regard them as pipe-dreams.

Here’s a bit of software application development scrabble for you to serve as Friday down time. Hopefully this comes with enough of a thought-provoking nudge that you might even like to play.

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Free image source: Wikimedia

Here’s the genesis behind my thought process. I was listening to F.E.A.R. by Ian Brown (he of Stone Roses fame naturally) this afternoon and revelling in the fact that he sings the whole song with each line simply composed of four words each starting with the letters F.E.A.R.

Could I do that with D.E.V.E.L.O.P.E.R. I wondered? Here my best shot at it:

1. Does Every Vendor Exaggerate Lavishly Over Products’ Endless Rewards?

2. DOS Evolved Via Engineers’ Love Of Programming Excellence Realistically

3. Debian Evangelists Verify Existing Logic (in) Open-Source Programming Efficiency Repeatedly

4. Delivering Enterprise Value Envelops Large Organisations Promoting Early Retirement

5. Determined Engineers Virtually Everywhere Look Over Programmes Ever-so Relentlessly

6. Databases Evolve Validating Every Last Object Possible Encompassed (in) Releases

7. Did Everyone Violate Enterprise Linux Or Pathologically Embrace RedHat?

8. Devious Employees Voluntarily Entrap Losers Over Potential Eclipse Rollout

9. Designing (for) End-User Vulnerability Eventually Lowers Obvious Problems (for) Each Replication

… and finally,

10. Dose (of) Extra Viagra Extends Leading Operating-System Performance Exponentially (in) Real-time

I know, I know – I need to get out more. Enough already!

Two’s a crowd on the cloud by all accounts – well it is if you want security and backup functionality out of your apps; they just don’t fit on right now. Current postulating and pontificating as to what does and does not fit on the cloud is rife - and everyone seems to have their own opinion as to how many enterprise applications we could or should be able to fit on the cloud without causing a crowd.

So, is the cumulus nimbus too fluffy to support real world cloud computing structures right now?

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Commentators have suggested that cloud computing really doesn’t break the mould to quite the degree that the technology publicists would have us believe. In the same way that Intel’s multi-core parallelism mantra has been cited as something of a throwback to the parallel computing processes that IBM was talking about in the sixties – so cloud computing is, arguably, just another way of extending the on-demand nature of those applications and services available to us in the post web 2.0 era. (Obvious comparisons with grid and utility computing probably don’t even bear mentioning here.)

Whether you buy the arguments for cloud computing or harbour a healthy degree of scepticism, it won’t stop the ‘cloud converts’ talking about how suitable the fluffy white stuff is for a whole range of computing scenarios. Good for the cloud, allegedly, are software downloads where multiple repositories exist, particularly where there is a distribution of data to multiple geographies.

Before you mist up and get all overcast with this idea, proponents argue that the cloud is ‘effectively becoming just another server’ and that there are identifiable areas where this structure will work with so-called natural efficiency. SOA is next in line for migration to the cloud if you believe companyies like open source ESB company Mulesource.

NB: they have a DEVELOPERS link right on the top of the home page, so that buys them a second look in my humble opinion.

Mulesource is of the opinion that where the cloud gets interesting is when you can “bridge” to the enterprise and make it look like one complete resource. At the moment the cloud is a node that sits outside of the enterprise. It's basically next-generation hosting with some sophisticated scaling abilities. The future state, say the company, is likely to be very different, but we need to start consuming cloud services and applications to see what directions they go in.

… from goofy to ridiculous

I spoke recently to MuleSource CEO Dave Rosenberg about all this theorising and this is what he had to say, “The bigger picture is that right now the cloud is just another computing resource that may or may not be connected to your enterprise. This notion that we are going to move everything in the enterprise to the cloud ranges from goofy to ridiculous. How many people are going to fully deploy a large-scale enterprise system with multiple (let's say 10 or more) applications in the cloud? Probably zero. But putting one or two pieces into the cloud? That’s much more realistic and will have much less disruptive impact on your business.”

Still not convinced? Well, I’m not saying I am either. But this is the kind of way vendors are talking about the cloud right now. The worrying thing perhaps is that there are just as many interpretations of what is and isn’t right for the cloud as there are companies trying to sell us that idea that they have a handle on the way that cloud computing will eventually work once the skies clear.

Perhaps the term ‘cloud’ it’s just a better way for people to understand resources delivered in this on demand way in the post-grid computing world? If it is more palatable to the Internet-generation when presented this way, then perhaps there is fair weather head and we’ll get to a resolution as to what applications should fit on the cloud and when they should be there sooner rather than later.

So there you have it. Tune in this time next week for my blog on “Atmosphere Computing” and read all about how we’ll soon be able to harness the power of the sun to make our online shopping applications run with extra zing ☺