Blown Away!

Sometimes I like to believe that my passion for technology watch gives me this little je ne sais quoi that allows me to determine with a pretty good accuracy whether a given technology is going to be huge or not. Of course sometimes I’m proven wrong, most of the time because something else comes in the way and changes everything. But this time…

If you want to bet on technology horses, here are my tips for the 5 years to come:

• Rich Internet Applications, and more specifically Flex
• Model-Driven Architecture, and more specifically AndroMDA
• Service-Oriented Architectures, and more specifically… nothing in particular, flexible solutions first and foremost (maybe we have to find another name for it before IBM and others make it disappear under tons of marketing crap)
• Semantic Web, including RDF, OWL & Co.
• And my special mention today goes to… the one that just reappeared in my top 5: MOBILE SERVICES!

Of course I’m talking about Google’s Android.

Yes, I know, my opinion is biased, I usually love everything Google does, because I can’t help admiring the creativity they are able to generate and the innovation they drive. But hey, I’ve been doing Java ME development on my free time for a few years now, and each time I came back to it, it was like a huge pain: all this fragmentation, impossible to use even the simplest services on my own 6-month old phone… and I don’t even mention this crappy emulator. And now I can’t even develop on my Mac!

Well, guess what! I’ve only been playing with Android for a few minutes, and it has a great development environment (even if I’m still waiting for the IntelliJ integration), a very good-looking emulator, and the API seems really simple to use. And when you read all the industry commitment there is behind it with the Open Handset Alliance, and you start to imagine this could become THE industry standard, with all its openness and non-fragmentation. That’s really exciting!

You know what, that’s what I’ll never like with Sun Microsystems: they have this very annoying tendancy to let go, to release a big clumsy technology, and to rest on the fact that they are the first one on this market. And then they wait. They have done it with J2EE (those who do EJB’s, raise your hands! that’s what I thought…), Spring & Co have created something better, now they’re trying to catch up with JSF and EJB3, but I doubt they will make it. And now it could happen with J2ME: they have neglected mobile platforms for too long, and now they’re going to pay the price. Do I believe that JavaFX Mobile is going to change it? Look, I haven’t seen a single working environment with it yet, but why not. Time will tell!

What about you? What horses would you bet your savings on?