Home > About Us  > Articles and White Papers  > Top IT Trends in Application Development for 2008

Top IT Trends in Application Development for 2008

We find our e-mail inbox inundated with IT predictions for the new year from analysts, vendors and consultants. From those predictions and our own predictions QAT presents our forecast for the top IT trends in application development for the year ahead in no particular order of importance.

1. Business Process Management -- BPM is more of a business discipline than a technology, but is necessary to make sure the technology of service-oriented architectures (SOA) deliver business value. SOA and BPM have common objectives; they are both focused on driving agility, driving business process improvement, flexibility and adaptability within the organization. SOA is a key mechanism that makes BPM easier.

2. SOA and Standards Will Close the Gap between Legacy and Open Systems --
   SOA is all about bringing technology and business closer at a macro level and bringing individual IT components together at a micro level. In much the same way, standards encourage integration between disparate systems. With both, SOA and standards, enabling the type of flexible, composite applications and services required to compete in what is now a global playing field.

3. Web 2.0 or Rich Internet Application (RIA) – will continue its domination of the paradigm of choice for web-based applications.

4. Web Platform & WOA – Web-oriented architecture, a version of SOA geared toward Web applications, is part of a trend in which the number of IT functions being delivered as a service is greatly expanding. Beyond the well-known software-as-a-service, over time everything could be delivered as a service, including storage and other basic infrastructure needs.

5. Hardware virtualization will continue to grow become the "norm" for new deployments.

6. Green IT --  This one is taking on a bigger role for many reasons, including an increased awareness of environmental danger; concern about power bills; regulatory requirements; government procurement rules; and a sense that corporations should embrace social responsibility.

7. The next big thing -- The in software development will change to wider use of code generators. Forget about heavy frameworks regardless of what programming language you use. In a simple case, use some XML style sheets combined with the metadata that describe your application objects to automatically generate the code for these objects. On the larger scale, the entire application may be described using metadata and the XML, and an appropriate code generator will do the job. So programming will change from writing a tedious code that requires lots of coders to describing the metadata and writing custom code generators.

For more information, please visit QAT's Application Development Solutions.