Bruce Perens' Forecasts for 2006

[newbie2]

Bruce Perens' Forecasts for 2006 :

"Trouble ahead for PHP and Java begins its decline as an Enterprise Platform"

http://perens.sourcelabs.com/articles/2005/12/07/bruce-perens-forecasts-for-2006

[az]

The whole thing:
"Bruce Perens' Weblog



Bruce Perens' Forecasts for 2006
Posted by Bruce Perens 9 days ago

Java begins its decline as an Enterprise Platform
Java's been the darling of big-company web development for a while now. But it falls flat in one critical area: time-to market. Upstart web platforms like Ruby on Rails have shown that you can use your development time - the most critical resource - much more effectively and put out applications in weeks that might otherwise have taken months or years. The result is scalable - add cheap hardware instead of expensive time. Not ready to switch? Don't be surprised when your competitors go in 2006 where you're planning to be in 2007.

Native Linux APIs gain ground as a Cellular Applications Platform
Java's also the Cell phone industry's answer to portability, but not to performance. Take an underpowered, RAM-constrained, battery-limited platform and use Java to run your applications and you get an even slower, more limited platform that uses the battery up faster. Handset manufacturers are starting to realize that they all share the ARM processor in common - it's only the operating system API that differs. There's a better answer than Java to the portability question: run the same native executables across multiple cell phone platforms. The advent of Linux and Open Source GUIs in feature phones, and standardization projects like those run by OSDL and Free Standards Group, will begin to provide that answer in 2006.

Cellular Carriers are Just Carriers
Cellular carriers have chased the dream of value-added content, served through feature phones, as a revenue enhancer. But they're ignoring history: remember the first generation of internet providers? Compuserve, Prodigy, Genie, GNN, and AOL all worked hard to provide unique content and enhance the user experience. They lost out to a second generation of internet providers that were just high-speed data pipes, while content moved to carrier-independent entities like Google and the user experience was engineered by software application providers like Netsape, Microsoft, and eventually the Mozilla project. Edge-enhanced GPRS is already available in most U.S. markets, thanks to the conversion of American cellular infrastructure to GSM. It provides a means to access the global internet and ignore carrier content. And that's what feature-phone users will do.

Feature Phones vs. Cars
Feature phones have done excellently in Japan because people ride commuter rail and have lots of time for idle hands and minds. The Americans, with their hands on the steering wheel, aren't a fertile market for much more than you can already get at the iTunes store. Feature phones and the content sent to them will prosper in markets where many people ride mass transit - and not elsewhere.

Trouble ahead for PHP
PHP has become the BASIC of web application design, used primarily by designers without too much computer science background. The platform hasn't taken well to multiprocessing, and is doing poorly enough from a security standpoint that "PHP security" conferences have been hastily organized. PHP's woes aren't so much a problem with the PHP core as with existing libraries and applications on top of PHP and their lack of future-proofness. If PHP is to be faulted, it is because the platform designers never placed an emphasis on good software design by their users - for example, most PHP developers don't write using a model-view-controller paradigm.

While organizations invested in PHP will band-aid their existing code, new projects will move to other platforms, with designers more cognizant of both software engineering and application security."



Very intersting.

[asimon]

Java begins its decline as an Enterprise Platform
[...] Upstart web platforms like Ruby on Rails have shown that you can use your development time - the most critical resource - much more effectively and put out applications in weeks that might otherwise have taken months or years. [...]

Regarding Java and Ruby there is also an interesting article from Bruce Eckel: The departure of the hyper-enthusiasts (http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312).

Summary:The Java hyper-enthusiasts have left the building, leaving a significant contingent of Java programmers behind, blinking in the bright lights without the constant drumbeat of boosterism.