2009 Predictions

With the new year fast approaching my mind turns to what’s coming up in the next year.

Centaur
Centaur is slated to be released in 2009 as ColdFusion 9. I’m confident it will be. ORM and the IDE will be the most talked about features. Although ORM is talked about, it will be slow to move in to the mainstream of CF development. Considering the time it took to get CFC’s to be widely adopted, I think ORM will be what’s hot in 2010 but bleeding edge in 2009.

The IDE will be a big seller, and I mean seller. I think the IDE will be a for purchase and stand-alone product. I think there will be a lot of people developing on Bolt and Centaur for production ColdFusion 8 applications for some time to come.

ColdFusion Development
Apple will continue to gain market share among CF developers. Ubuntu boxes will also proliferate as Vista users with regrets can’t justify new hardware purchases but tire of Vista’s drawbacks.

Web Development in General
Rails and Merb joining together will cause the Ruby development community to get a major boost. The meme that “rails is cool, but not ready for enterprise” will really get challenged.

Technology in General
There will be an increase in problems due to companies putting off equipment upgrades in an attempt to cut costs. I think companies will continue to push more hardware outsourcing regardless if they experience a cost-cutting driven failure or not.

That’s all I have for now, if I think of more I’ll add…


Published by tpryan

5 thoughts on “2009 Predictions”

  1. That’s a spot-on take on technology purchases. For several years, I’ve heard quite a few younger developers proclaim that hardware is cheap, so effeciency should take a back seat to other concerns when writing code. Granted, code portability, accessibility, and efficiency are often at odds with one another, but it feels to me that efficiency has been taking a back seat lately, due to Moore’s law and the ever decreasing price of hardware. Throwing a new, shiny piece of hardware at a problem has been considered an acceptable solution, and one I abhor.

    I’m going to say that efficiencies in code are going to be making a come back. Saving valuable system resources and CPU cycles wherever you can all adds up when it comes to trying to scale your application properly.

    I’d love to see you do a more in-depth entry on what is coming in Centaur. As a relative CF noob, I’ve been impressed with how the language has evolved since I last used it early this century!

    Regards,

    -Tim

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  3. Tim:

    My opinion has always been that if the cost for additional hardware to match performance is cheaper than the cost of additional programming time to improve natural performance then hardware is an acceptable solution. But quite frankly in my experience if code is written with an eye towards performance to begin with the additional time is minimal, and additional hardware cost, especially if the app needs to scale is often times $1000’s more over the life of an app, and poor performance can cost even more.

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  4. Terry,

    Nice. I look forward to seeing how spot on you are. Your corporate spending prediction hits home with me:

    http://blog.cutterscrossing.com/index.cfm/2008/6/22/Build-Applications-That-Scale

    I’ll add one to your list though: expect a much higher rate of malicious web-based attacks, on both conventional and mobile platforms, propogated by organized crime and targeting identity theft. Keyloggers, Phishing attacks, etc will become much more sneaky and sophisticated. Big business will be in credit monitoring. Far more so than in the past.

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  5. I am psyched about bolt and Hibernate. Like yourself I am a big fan of code generation/automation. From what I have gathered from the blog posts and quips I have "over heard" I am guessing that the Bolt and Hibernate combo will be a productivity monster.

    Tho only other thing I would have added to that is Railo 3.1 will make great strides as well seeing that will have Hibernate/ORM support. That and I think we will see a higher degree of CF runtime interoperability as a result of the CFML advisory board.

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