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“Stop learning programming; Get trained in system analysis“- In 70s, this was the advice given by a famous futurologist to the young students who were interested in software programming. Some of the ongoing trends in the industry may support this theory but still there are proponents who anchor the traditional application development ship from sinking. Experts are jumping out with different opinions about the future of application development. Let me just give you a gist of these discussions.

• Organizations started religiously following the keyword “Reusability”. SOA evolved from this and forms the basis of SaaS, Cloud, etc. which removes the burden of writing applications from scratch
• Another school of thought is there will be two types of developers in the future where one will be writing code to develop tools and the other will be using the tool as platform to develop applications. Example: BPM suite acts as a platform to develop process oriented applications without extensive coding
• Increasingly Developers are advised to use scripts, frameworks and reusable components to develop applications rather than developing from scratch. More the reusable services you develop less the time to bring up applications. Indeed, Complex applications need extensive coding
• One important argument put forward is the expectation from business for reduced time-to-market is the topmost reason for moving towards the modeling tools to develop application. People are betting high that this may be the way of future since it saves time and money in the long run
• Domain Specific Languages (DSL) is gaining more importance among experts. This might reduce the usage of generic programming languages but will not replace it completely. E.g. BPEL & BPMN for BPM domain, XML for Middleware applications, etc.
• Finally a proponent of traditional coding joined the party by quoting the example of Mainframe systems based on COBOL. People still coding using COBOL and will code in future also. At least in near future it’s not possible to erase the custom coding from the map of application development

The ambit of Application Development is still expanding and evolving leading to Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools, Sophisticated architectures, Frameworks, Computing methodologies. But still all these developments were made possible with traditional coding using generic programming languages. So can we tell that “Co-Existence” is the keyword in this context????

Dinesh BPM, Custom Application Development, Technology Snippets Application Development, BPM, SaaS, SOA