The Decade of Development - Emergence of Web Frameworks (
Page 2 of 3 )
4. The Emergence of Web Frameworks
With the Web as the development platform, the need for Web
development frameworks became paramount. This is where Ruby on Rails
caught steam and started to roll and along at a fast clip. Then came
others like Django and JBoss Seam to name a few. Says Hansson: "Before
this decade, most everyone where rolling their own home-brew
frameworks. Today very few bother. I'd like to think that Rails played
a big part in this."
5. Web 2.0
Spawned by the blossoming of Web services and the underlying
foundation of SOA, the Web 2.0 craze hit by the middle of the decade
and has been at the heart of all kinds of new computing paradigms and
startups with new business models. The term is commonly associated with
Web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing,
interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World
Wide Web. Examples of Web 2.0 include Web-based communities, hosted
services, Web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing
sites, wikis, blogs, mashups, and folksonomies. Tim O'Reilly is
credited with having coined the term Web 2.0.
6. Simple Beats Complex
Although the Noughties saw its share of complex systems -- as
systems began to scale to enormous proportions (which will be part of
the next installment of this series) -- the decade also can be viewed
as one where simple solutions easily beat out complex ones. For
instance, Hansson said: "Simple beats complex: Ruby over Java, Rails
over J2EE, REST over SOAP, etc, etc. Complexity fell out of fashion."
7. The Rise of Scripting/Dynamic Languages
The last decade saw the use of dynamic languages grow significantly,
with both Sun and Microsoft vying to add dynamic language support to
the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and .NET's Common Language Runtime,
respectively. Microsoft produced its IronPython and IronRuby
implementations of Python and Ruby, and Sun adopted the JRuby and
Jython technology. Languages such as PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, Groovy,
and especially JavaScript are totally in vogue.
Asked about another type of programming (which will be part of
another installment), Booch said: "I'd suggest the rise of scripting
languages -- PHP, Perl, Ruby, and of course JavaScript -- coupled with
X M L leading us to things like AJAX [Asynchronous JavaScript and X M
L] and Dojo as a more important advancement, for that has fueled so
much innovation and has been the center of so much contemporary
programming."
8. The Developer Community Bifurcates
The last decade was one of empowerment for developers – for the uber
developers who build tools for others to use, for the programming
wizards who use those tools to build software systems, as well as for
dabblers, power users and just plain folk who need to put together a
quick solution for them or their small team.
Thus, Sun's Gosling said one observation of the last decade for him is that:
"The community strongly bifurcates into hackers and engineers:
hackers prioritize slapping stuff together as fast as possible;
engineers take more time and concentrate much more on scalability,
reliability and performance."
Although some might see a disparaging comment there, it was not
meant as such. Several of the factors below actually lead to this, such
as the rise of scripting languages and frameworks and tools aimed at
enabling folks like designers and line-of-business staff to create
applications -- perhaps as mashups.
Application Development News & Reviews 
