EJB was great for consultants. Complicated software is always good for consultants. Companies need to pay you to explain the darn thing.
Just look at how good COM was for Don Box :)
I think one of the next beasts like this will be offline web applications. With Apollo, Slingshot, Dojo, and the other offline toolkits coming out we are going to see a lot of people saying “I want that”, and “make this work offline”.
The web is a world of connectivity. We have been building applications that take that assumption for granted. Now, with offline, we are changing the paradigm.
Beware the seemless example
Remember the talk of EJB where you can just call a method on a stub and it could be local or remote. Who knows! It was this ignorance that enabled a slew of applications that ran dog slow as they talked across network boundaries and serialized data back and forth all day.
Writing offline capable web applications is going to be hard to do right. We are going to have to take a step back and rethink how our applications are going to work with a new dimension added to the mix.
If you want to make a lot of money consulting, get good at building offline web apps and rake it in :)
April 2nd, 2007 at 7:24 pm
With the Dojo Offline Toolkit we are trying to make sure that these apps actually work well, work fast, and are relatively straightforward for developers to put together. But, developers do have to think through the problem, especially for synchronization. All we can do is provide some guideposts, and help the user with usable offline UIs (DOT comes bundled with a default UI widget for offline interaction, based on usability tests). If you ever see us falling into EJB land with hard to use APIs and apps that don’t perform, please call us on it and we will shift the system. Unlike some of the other toolkits, Dojo Offline does one thing and tries to do it well: offline enabled access for web apps without introducing a new programming model or new front end technology. These are just browser-based Ajax apps with a little bit of offline-pixie dust sprinkled on them.
Best,
Brad
April 5th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
IBM’s Websphere and Portal Servers will keep consultants overpaid for a long time to come but I just can’t imagine offline pages are of any significance to anyone.
April 6th, 2007 at 3:02 am
I had a really good read on this, very detail,
and very useful information.Thanks.
VOB to Zune
http://www.vob-converter.com
April 7th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Good things, I haven
May 19th, 2008 at 12:06 am
i’d like to say this blog is a goldmine to fresh learners like me.
June 24th, 2008 at 2:03 am
thanks for your sharing!