At our staff meeting today, my manager told us our director was looking for input on emerging "21st century" technologies and technology trends, and to send him our thoughts so he could pass them along. Here's what I sent:
- The introduction of applications that have both a web and and desktop front-end to access server-side data, with the desktop application provide offline functionality and data storage that can then be synchronized with the back-end data. Examples of this upcoming movement are Adobe AIR, Google Gears, and the Mozilla Prism project.
- Increased portability of programming languages to other platforms. It's now possible to code .NET or Java application in dynamic languages such as Python or Ruby.
- Increasing development of RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) based on AJAX, Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, and JavaFX. RIAs allow for more engaging and more powerful user interfaces and (in the case of the latter 3 technologies) make it easier to integrate audio-visual material into applications.
- The continued growth of "cloud computing," where organizations store their non-critical data on external servers maintained by a third party but controlled and accessed by the organization over the Internet. The chief example of this is Amazon's S3 data service.
- The continued trend of exposing the social (people-based) connections between data started by the social networking sites. The social networks themselves may stop growing, but the idea of using a person as a focal point for otherwise unrelated data is going to stick around.
...Hardly earth-shattering predictions, but other than within my particular unit, my organization isn't that hip to web trends.
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