Software development is going through a rapid evolution enabled by the ubiquity and ease-of-use of the web, simple to use software, tools, and techniques, dramatic rise in computer literacy, and the development of standards around Web Services. All these forces together are giving rise to a new paradigm for the collaboration, creation, manipulation of dynamic content with the web as the platform, a.k.a. Web 2.0. The building of situational applications – applications built with just enough function to satisfy a business need, usually by business users – by mixing and re-mixing existing components are becoming more and more common. These trends will force businesses to rethink how their applications and services are designed, developed, and managed. This in turn will put the onus on IT infrastructure companies to offer new tools for development, management and integration of situational applications and services. This will also act as a disruptive agent and will hasten the refactor of monolithic applications into standardized and compartmentalized sub-components that can be mixed, matched, and replaced to deliver desired solutions.
Last updated 8 Jun 2006