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Java and the new Internet programming paradigm

An excerpt from <em>Rise & Resurrection of the American Programmer</em>

By Edward Yourdon, JavaWorld.com, 08/01/96

One of the most significant technological developments since the publication of Decline and Fall of the American Programmer has been the introduction of a new breed of languages and development tools for creating applications on the Internet and the World Wide Web. The "information superhighway" is the hottest thing in the computing industry today, but when the Internet and the Web first burst on the scene a couple years ago, they seemed completely divorced from the traditional application development community in IT organizations. Many of the frantic discussions of security and firewalls that take place even today make it evident that many IT managers would like to keep it this way.

From the perspective of IT organizations, the Internet originally meant e-mail, Usenet newsgroups, FTP file transmission mechanisms, and associated utilities such as Archie, Gopher, and WAIS. Naturally, this caused some clamoring from users who wanted to connect their internal, corporate, LAN-based e-mail systems to the Internet, but many large IT organizations have managed to resist this. When the Web came along a little later, the typical reaction from IT organizations was, "Oh, look, a cute little publishing environment! Now maybe our users will stop pestering us about PageMaker and Quark!" True, some organizations did add forms and Perl scripts and CGI gateways to access information from the corporate databases, but for the most part, the Web has been a mechanism for publishing static content for users to browse at their leisure.

In the spring of 1994, with Sun Microsystems' formal announcement of the Java programming language, it became apparent that this comfortable view of the Internet/Web as a phenomenon distinct from traditional application development was about to change dramatically. Internet aficionados were and still are excited by Java's ability to bring live content to the user's workstation. But for traditional programmers, there are far more profound consequences: Just when programmers were getting used to client-server technology and languages like PowerBuilder, Visual Basic, and Delphi, the Java phenomenon promised to change the nature of application development completely. While technical concepts like object-orientation will continue to play an important role in tomorrow's Web-based applications, just about everything else is going to change in this new world. For example, programmers are likely to spend their time building tiny applets rather than large, monolithic applications -- and the marketplace could end up paying for these applets on a "per usage" basis, rather than on the licensing basis so prevalent today. If you're going to ride this new technology wave, you're going to need to change a lot of your assumptions and plans about the tools you'll be using, the development processes you'll be following, and the professional skills of the people in your organization.

I believe that Java represents an enormous opportunity for the North American software industry. As with all of the other technologies discussed in my book, there are no guarantees and no monopolies -- that is particularly true of technology associated with the Internet. Java-related development is going on all around the world, but the concentration of activity is much higher in the U.S. than elsewhere. We may only have a head start of two to three years, but that should be enough to capture a great deal of the market share before the software industries of Western Europe, Asia, and the developing nations begin making serious efforts to catch up.

 

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