Software Development Predictions for 2005

Don Box has come out with his his top 10 predictions of 2005. Predictions are an interesting read in that they give you some insight on the perceptions of different authors. Hidden in any list of predictions is sometimes a wish list. A hidden desire that something improbable might happen. Many of Don Box's predictions are of course in the realm of "if the improbable happens, then I told you so and claim the credit". A tried and true technique used by many charlatans and snake oil salesmen.

In the spirit of completely outrageous predictions, I've come up with my own list:

1. Firefox Browser market share will continue to grow in 2005 and will be adopted by major PC vendors as the default installed browser. Marketshare parity with Internet Explorer will be achieved in 2005.
2. Eclipse marketshare will continue to grow, however James Gosling and Sun will continue to refuse to accept defeat. JetBeans IDEA will avoid acquisition. Oracle and BEA would release IDEs based on Eclipse in 2005. Borland will continue to stradle the fence.
3. AMD will continue to increase its performance dominance over Intel. AMD64 will be recognized as providing unmatched performance advantages when running Java based programs.
4. Javascript will regain dominance in the space of Rich Internet Applications (RIA). XMLHTTPRequest based applications will explode as well as Flash actionsript based applications.
5. Java developers will continue to abandon EJB as the standard way of building Java based server applications. Lightweight frameworks like Spring will continue to take marketshare. Aspect Oriented Oriented programming will make steady progress however will not yet gain mainstream acceptance. IBM will gain more marketshare at the expense of BEA in the J2EE space.
6. Semantic XHTML will continue to gain mind share as the best way to encode semantic information. XMLSchema will decline in usage. RDF encoding will be simplified such that it would be indistinguishable from Semantic XHTML.
7. SOA will continue to mesmerize the masses. However a new kind of marketecture called GAA (Grid Agent Architecture) will emerge as the latest and greatest innovation. However, it'll take a couple years for standards to be developed to properly leverage this new innovation. WS-* will move close to irrelevance despite the huge marketing campaigns of many vendors. RESTful based applications will continue to grow.
8. Large costly multi-cpu servers will be abandoned in favor of lots of cheap low cost single CPU servers. This trend will cut into the revenue streams of hardware vendors. The deployment of thousands of these low cost servers will also make it prohibitively costly to use Microsoft's Windows.
9. IT Deflation will be the continuing trend. Hardware will continue to get cheaper, more software will become open source and services will continue to move offshore. There will be more fragmentation in the open source world with many different platforms competing in the same market. This fragmentation will create opportunities for micro-ISV vendors who can survive in smaller markets. Venture capitalist will focus their attention on companies that can exploit the Long Tail.
10. Scripting languages will become dominant in addressing the needs of situated software. Speed of implementation will be the game and sloppiness will be the by product. Prototype based inheritance will be favored over static inheritance. The distinction between configuration, specification and instance will be completely blurred. Finally, documentation can be discovered only be reading the source code.

There you have it folks, my predictions for 2005. To be concise, general trends I've noticed in the past year and will continue to hold tree in the coming year. Happy New Year to all, and please don't be stingy with your donations to aid the victims of the Tsunami.