Rozlog’s Top 10 Software Development predictions for 2009

10.  RIA’s will show increased signs of weakness; as more and more client side technologies are employed to create Rich Internet Enabled applications that act like Windows applications when the Windows OS is right there to use with real applications. Users, Developers, and management might start to look at using the OS for was it was for… namely supporting applications and finally move away from all the 3^rd party client side technologies and start building solid applications that use the Internet as a communication device. Real applications that use the Internet protocols but don’t need a browser? Get out… check out an article I wrote on RIEA (Rich Internet Enabled Applications) for more background information.

9.  SSD will own 30% of the market; Just purchased a Terabyte of storage for $89 dollars, which is great. But SSD (Solid State Drives) are coming and I believe that in 2009 there will be a major shift towards these types of drives. They have some inherent advantages over standard hard drives; no moving parts, no heat, and extremely fast read times. SSD’s are still a little expensive, but as adoption and competition increases these will be the drives of the future.

8.  Groovy will gain more followers; Want a elegant solution for Web applications with Java? Then check out Groovy… program in Java, simple deployment, nice design pattern. Groovy should be the standard for Java Web development.

7.  Specialized chips (task oriented) will become standard on mother boards in an effort to move green. We are starting to see this trend with Graphics chips, where the manufacturer will put a light-weight graphics chip on the mother board and for normal use (email, browsing the web, etc) the on board graphics chip will be utilized. Then when the user wants to use PhotoShop or play the latest Game on the market, the real graphics boards kick in and do the work. Thus, when in general use the machine takes up much fewer resources and then on-demand can increase the resource consumption to fit the task at hand. This approach will be applied to other various other areas of the PC.

6. Agile, Spiral, XP, Waterfall are all the same; I know methodologies are sacred and not supporting one or the other can be bad and they feel much like a religion to me (for comparison check out the Programming Languages compared to religion article; here). But at the end of the day, no matter which approach you use for developing software it is imperative that every member of the team buys-into the approach. If everybody on the team believes and uses Waterfall for example, then the project will usually complete. Now, again that does not mean that the things about the waterfall approach is incorrect, it just means the team was able to follow a process to completion. I’m not bashing for support of any one software development methodology, I’m merely pointing out that to have success, everybody has to be onboard or they will all fail. I believe pick the best methodology for the application being created with the dependencies and constraints taken into account.

5.  Specialized maintenance teams will be setup in the down economy; new development is being put on hold during the down economy so companies are now setting up “swat” like teams for doing specialized maintenance of applications. These teams are there to upgrade or update the existing application, so they are usually comprised of the top-talent because they use the latest approaches to squeeze RIO out of the existing application, thus saving companies big money.

4.  Google’s Android not so much; Android has a lot of promise and it has some exciting technologies and approaches, but the Apple iPhone will continue to dominate in 2009. The initial phones based on Android are ok but they don’t currently meet the level of the iPhone, maybe next year.

3.  It appears to be getting cloudier… The cloud is exciting, and adopting the use of the cloud will continue as more companies start using the cloud, and more companies put services to be consumed on the cloud. There are still issues around cloud computing but in this exciting hype phase of the technologies those issues look to be on the far distant horizon.

2.  The browser war will not be settled; Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera, and now Chrome. Who will win the hearts and minds of the internet users? Well it won’t be decided in this year. I love the improvements that Internet Explorer has added with version 7 and the preview of 8. However, for overall speed and functionality it is hard to beat either Firefox 3 or Opera 9. Both of these browsers do a great job and I usually pick one of them for my day to day browsing activities. The new dark horse is Google’s Chrome. While I do like it and some of it features, it is limited in features and it can be a resource hog if you browse like I do with many tabs open at one time. I will be excited to see where Chrome goes in the future, but for now I will stick with Firefox and Opera, then use IE when I have to. But, I will still continue to play with Chrome.

1.  Microsoft Vista was a ploy to get everybody to buy Windows 7. Ok, here is my conspiracy theory of the year. I believe Microsoft wanted to introduce Vista with issues they knew most users would not like or want. I know this sound far-fetched, but go with me on this a little longer. What was the best Windows as far as sales was concerned, from a release standpoint? It was Windows 2000. Now over the past few years, Windows XP has caught up to Windows 2000 and surpassed it in the number of sales (due to the number of machines XP was installed on in OEM), but from an out-and-out purchase of an OS, Windows 2000 is the winner. What made Windows 2000 a must have upgrade? I know this goes back a while, but before Windows 2000, the biggest upgrade was Windows 98, and before that Windows 95. Does anybody remember how bad Windows ME (Millennium Edition) was? This version of Windows was despised by almost everybody and even made the list of The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time back in 2006. (Link to Article) It also introduced features that would someday become staples of users like System Restore, Automatic Updates, new version of IE to better support HTML and Media player that included other media types, but the product was extremely buggy and had problems working with existing hardware and software. This paved the way for Windows 2000 sales. The negative press on Win Me and the lack of adoption moved the Windows user community to purchase, upgrade, install and generally get their hands on Windows 2000. Isn’t it odd that Vista introduced various features that someday may be an OS staple, has hardware and software issues, and is generally despised by all? Does this mean that Windows 7 (or whatever they name it by the time it comes out) will be the biggest Windows release ever? The Windows community is definitely ready for a new OS and with Vista softening them up with countless issues, Windows 7 will be a HUGE, must have, need to buy a new computer to get the OS type of release.

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posted @ Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:41:32 +0000 by Michael Rozlog

Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #97

• Marco Cantu and Cary Jensen are planning a series of Delphi Developer Days in the US.   Should be great events, as both of these guys are experienced developers and presenters. Each event will be two intense days of training.  Register in the next two days and get a pretty good discount.
• Delphi 2009 now has a Help Update.  Dee can tell you more about it. 
• I’m surprised it took this long.  I haven’t even considered buying a desktop machine in years. 
• TMS Software has a very nice new set of "smooth controls" for Delphi.  Sweet.
• Jamie has some good tips on converting Delphi for .Net code to Delphi Prism.

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posted @ Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:44:28 +0000 by Nick Hodges

DelphiAccess - Nueva comunidad Delphi en Español

La comunidad de desarrolladores Delphi gana un regalo en esta navidad, DelphiAccess.com

Mas una comunidad para los desarrolladores Delphi, 100% en español

Un especial saludo a todos involucrados en este proyecto:

• egostar (Eliseo Gonzalez)
• Caral (Carlos Gutierrez)
• enecumene (Fernando)
• cHackAll (Javier Ferrari)
• seoane (Domingo Seoane)
• eduarcol (Eduardo Colmenares)
• Fenareth (Gabriela Fenareth)
• Jose Fco (Jose Francisco)
• poliburro (Edgar Ramirez)
• felipe (Adrian Felipe)
• Delphius (Marcelo Cuadrados)
• |KinG| (Jose Reinaldo Arellano)

Quiero dejar aquí, el sentimiento de toda la comunidad a |KinG| (Jose Reinaldo Arellano), parte del grupo de creadores de DelphiAccess. Com. King falleció esta semana.

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posted @ Mon, 29 Dec 2008 20:35:47 +0000 by Andreano Lanusse

New ZMail component added to VCL for PHP

We have added a new Zend Framework wrapper to VCL for PHP, this component provides the features found on the Zend_Mail package in a non-visual component you can drop in your forms/datamodules.

With this component you can easily send e-mails, in plain-text, in HTML or in multipart, attach files, select recipients, cc and bcc, add custom headers and select which transport to use, SMTP or Sendmail, by using two additional components.

Documentation has been updated, so you can download it directly from here:

http://www.qadram.com/vcl4php/vcldoc/vcldoc.tar.gz

Or browse the new ZMail component documentation here:

http://www.qadram.com/vcl4php/vcldoc/VCL/ZMail.html

Also, there is a sample which covers most of the features here:

http://vcl4php.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/vcl4php/trunk/website/samples/ZendFramework/ZMail/

And here is the updated Zend folder on the subversion repository:

http://vcl4php.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/vcl4php?view=rev&revision=264

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posted @ Fri, 26 Dec 2008 02:56:26 +0000 by José León

Happy Holidays from Embarcadero Technologies

Happy Holidays!  Whether you enjoy Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, Festivus, Winter Solstice, Junkanoo, Muharram 1, New Year’s Day, and other holidays during these weeks. I hope you have a wonderful time with family and friends.

Even though these are tough times in our economy and our world, I know we will get through them all together.  I send out the biggest and best of holiday wishes to all of our Embarcadero Community members and to all developers worldwide.  I hope you stay warm (cool if you are in the southern hemisphere) and well.

We’ll be bringing you a bag full of new products, some surprises, and bunch of innovations in 2009!

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posted @ Thu, 25 Dec 2008 02:19:58 +0000 by David Intersimone

Blog server maintenance scheduled for December 22, 2008

Update: Blog server maintenance is now completed. Thank you for your patience.

After 11am Pacific Time, our blog server will be temporarily down as it gets moved to our new network infrastructure. We expect the down time to be 5 to 30 minutes. We apologize for the inconvenient timing, but we’re in the middle of migrating all our servers to our new infrastructure, and not all of it can be done in the middle of the night! (Or the weekend.)

We appreciate your patience as we migrate all our servers to our greatly improved infrastructure. I hope you’ve been noticing the improved performance in the last couple weeks, as we’ve been migrating portions of it over.

We’ll be all done by January 1, 2009. What a great way to usher in the new year!

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posted @ Sun, 21 Dec 2008 05:12:02 +0000 by John Kaster

Embarcadero products are Jolt Award finalists in several categories

Embarcadero products are finalists in four of the 19th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards!  JBuilder, ER/Studio Enterprise Portal, Change Manager, and 3rdRail are finalists.  We’ve won several Jolt Awards in the past and are very proud to be finalists again.

Change and Configuration Management

• AccuRev (AccuRev)
• Change Manager (Embarcadero Technologies)
• JetBrains TeamCity (JetBrains TeamCity)
• OpenMake Meister (OpenMake Software)
• Plastic SCM (Codice Software)

Database Engines and Data Tools

• Altova DatabaseSpy (Altova)
• Aqua Data Studio (AquaFold)
• ER/Studio Enterprise Portal (Embarcadero Technologies)
• Postgres Plus (EnterpriseDB)
• Vertica Analytic Database (Vertica Systems)

Development Environments

• Altova MissionKit (Altova)
• JBuilder 2008 (Embarcadero Technologies)
• Komodo IDE (ActiveState Software)
• ReSharper 4.1 (JetBrains)
• Servoy (Servoy)

Mobile and Web Development

• 3rdRail for Ruby on Rails (Embarcadero Technologies)
• Adobe Device Central (Adobe Systems)
• MITE (Keynote Systems)
• NetBeans (Sun Microsystems)
• Yahoo! SearchMonkey (Yahoo!)

The winners will be announced during the Software Development West 2009 Conference, March 9-13, 2009 at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

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posted @ Sat, 20 Dec 2008 01:25:33 +0000 by David Intersimone

RS2009 Help Update 1 released

Our year-end push has been the first Help update for RS2009, and it is now available. See Kris’s notes at http://dn.codegear.com/article/39139. Next we’ll add the CHMs, PDFs, and HTMLs to docs.codegear.com; look for those in the New Year! Happy Holidays, -Dee

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posted @ Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:19:43 +0000 by Dee Elling

Time spent programming, reading, writing, etc in a "typical" day in 2009

On Tuesday March 7, 2002 Grady Booch invited everyone to tell him how much time they spent doing things, architecting, coding, testing, reading, stuff, of whatever else we do in a day. Grady reported the results of 50 people who reported what they spent time doing on that Tuesday:

Analyzing -16%
Designing - 14%
Coding - 16%
Testing - 10%
Phone - 3%
Reading journals and email - 7%
Productive meetings – 10%
Useless meetings – 7%
Other “stuff” – 17%

Since we are getting near the end of 2009, it would be great to hear from community members and SipFG blog readers about what they do on their typical day in 2009.

Today for example, I spent the following time at work after getting in to the office in Scotts Valley at 7:15am:

• Making strong coffee in the coffee room - 5 minutes
• Coding three Delphi apps to analyze customer registration data - 120 minutes
• Altering a reporting database for the same data analysis - 30 minutes
• Email - 30 minutes
• Reading comments on my blog - 20 minutes
• Writing this blog post - 30 minutes
• Call with my co-Chief Evangelist Greg Keller - 30 minutes
• Filling out expense reports before year end for trips to Europe/San Francisco and my cell phone bills - 20 minutes
• Eating lunch at my desk while reading some technology news on DDJ.com, CNN, Slashdot Developers, Internet News - 20 minutes.
• Reading Pawel Glowacki’s "Building and Consuming Web Services with Delphi 2009" blog article - 10 minutes.
• Reproducing Pawel Glowacki’s Web services example from his blog post - 30 minutes (had a few problems with my Dell notebook’s IIS setup running Windows Vista).
• Reading items on DelphiFeeds.com - 10 minutes
• Reading posts on the Embarcadero CodeGear public forums (I use XanaNews, built with Delphi) - 30 minutes
• Other stuff (time flies like an arrow) - 45 minutes.

And it’s only 2:15pm.  I’ve got at least 4 more hours to go before I go home :)

What did you spend time working on today?  How does it compare with your typical day in 2009?

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posted @ Fri, 19 Dec 2008 22:29:48 +0000 by David Intersimone

Foro en español para usuarios de Delphi para PHP

Para que los usuarios de Delphi para PHP y VCL para PHP podamos realizar consultas sobre los productos en español, hemos creado este foro específico:

http://www.qadram.com/vcl4php/forums/viewforum.php?f=14

Esperamos que os sea de utilidad.

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posted @ Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:36:07 +0000 by José León