can you see your future?

from: http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t96436.html

 

Each morning when I wake up and peer into my crystal ball, I find that it's been getting a bit hazy lately. This afternoon as I was scouring the web, I came across a post at JRoller from someone who was hoping against hope that the future of applications would not be browser applications. This person even quoted Allison Randall over at O'Reilly who points out several significant movements surrounding Rich Internet Applications that are not running inside the browser, look awesome, and could point to the future.

Personally, I have long felt that desktop applications have gotten a bad rap. When combined with an Internet connection, I believe they can offer a much richer experience than what the browser is able to produce. With the connection speeds that most people have available today, many of the problems that plagued rich Java applications in the past are no longer issues. People generally aren't that afraid to install things on their computers (have you ever seen the desktop of a general computer user?), and I think as developers we should take advantage of that.

The future isn't going to be strictly in the browser and as Adobe and Microsoft are showing us, their new technologies are going to work both in the browser and out. Of course, they could both be wrong and Sun could be right - the mobile phone (or a device like it) could be the future. At the last few JavaOne's, we've been hearing that the mobile device is the future. It remains to be seen, but it's good to see that Sun is trying to make things that work in the browser, on the desktop, and on your phone, all without needing to rewrite your code. Will it work? It remains to be seen, and who knows if their crystal balls are any clearer than mine.

 

 

I'll take a shot :-)

Let's see what my crystall ball tells me:

I believe the computer working environment is changing. You work from multiple places, and yet want to have access to the same set of solutions. You want your working place to be associated to your identity, not to some physical place. Why do people use GMail instead of Thunderbird or some other desktop application, when some of them are clearly superior to GMail? well, because it's universally accessible. I do not need to carry anything (no DVD, no USB, no computer) in order to use MY email. People will develop the same expectation for just about any application. After all, If software houses have insisted for decades that they sell you the "right" to use a software and not the software itself, so be it - allow me to execute that right anywhere.

So this means that probably people are starting to perceive applications as something "you go to with a browser", not as something downloaded statically on a physical place. The Internet is becoming an extension of the desktop, and soon it will BE the "desktop" as more and more RIAs are deployed. So I believe browser-based RIAs will continue to be much more popular than "web-delivered" applications. The ordinary user is too busy or uninterested to understand concepts as "caching" and "autoupdate". So, even though he could click on that Java WebStart or Silverlight icon on the desktop and have the application auto-update itself, I believe he will still choose to go to its home page by means of a browser just to "access the latest version".

Of course, if there's no network, there're no applications, but usually mom&pop biz won't care, because conectivity will be pretty much assumed, just like electricity. Unless lives or huge amounts of money depend on connectivity, people won't take measures to protect themselves against that (just as the only ones who have electricity generators are hospitals, military bases and the like).

Looking further in my crystal ball, I don't see mobiles or portables or desktops. I see wearables, immersive environments and augmented reality. I wish it happened during my life time, but I'm not so sure anymore. Further into the future - implants. You'd no longer need to look for information, you'd "remember" it naturally. But that, of course, is S&F currently.