"Economist" Science and Technology Edition Senior Reporter Ludwig Siegele defines the future software: a huge, electronic service system supported by the Internet. People can seek everything from it.
There are 25 years of programming experience in Stuart. Fletman is easily misunderstood to be a person who is holding a hysterist attitude. As a skilled software engineer, the IBM Senior Commercial Software Research Office, he believes that programming is a painful course - the pain caused by growing complexity. He explained that programming is like writing poems, every word, every arrangement is important. But the software is more difficult to write poetry because the digital poems have millions of lines, each line is interconnected. And when you try to find a bug (bug) in the software, you will often find a new insect. And the software will become more complicated, he is saddened, and no one has found a silver bomb to kill the monster.
Give Flet and a writing board, he will give you a blueprint for future software. In the context of his astronomer, he also portrays the future software industry into a nebula map. In this picture, customers are automatically communicated, linked, negotiated, and negotiated in the virtual world created by web services. ......
This will bring huge changes to our lives and company trading methods. Especially for business customers. Imagine that you are a salesmanship of new products, your R & D team just handed it to you. You can order from your personal portal to the part, scheduled production and arrange sales, you can create a production line immediately, once the work is completed, the production line can dissolve.
Software network revolution
Of course, reality and ideals have gaps. However, there is no doubt that the computer industry is about to have a major revolution. This revolution will grow rapidly in the 1980s, making the software as a very important product, that is, personal computer-based software will gradually let go of the network service provided.
This doesn't mean that the software we are well known is about to disappear. We still need enough code to run this new computer world because many large machines still need independent software support. We just say, in the future, the computer industry will not focus on manufacturing those huge, isolated procedures. Instead, they will pay more attention to the use of software to provide different network electronic services - from simple data storage to the entire business Run management process.
The Internet is the driving force for this change. From the beginning, it changed the naturalness of the software. Software is no longer a static program running on PC or other hardware, which can run on the entire internet, and the viewer can use these applications through the network. Many software companies now offer the "host" version of their products, which means that these software can be used as an online service.
More importantly, the Internet has become a powerful promoter for open standards. There are two reasons, first, the network is an ideal medium for creating standards; it allows groups to cooperate without cost, and make decisions become Transparent, second, ubiquitous networks make standards popularization faster. Moreover, the Internet has already given a very organization, such as IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), W3C (the actual result caused by WORLD WIDE Web or more is open source movement. Since the 1980s, thousands of volunteers worldwide Through E-mail communication, they work together to write their freeware, they are often used as their starting point as the Internet. Linux is their flagship products, this constant operating system is by a Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds Creative.
The emergence of the Internet-based service is very similar to the open source movement. The computer industry has developed a number of new network service standards together with other industries. We can see: XML (Scalable Markup Language), RosettaTaT (providing unified standard non-profit company) EBXML (e-commerce XML), XAML, SOAP Simple Object Access Protocol) UDDI, WSDL, etc. But these letters also illustrate a potential problem: these standards have the complexity and uniformity of these standards will become an important obstacle to the development of the future computer software industry. Software industry
Software industry is so mixed, why is so many people so concerned? One of the best reasons is that the software industry is one of the most developed industries in the world. According to IDC statistics, the sales software in 1999 reached $ 157 billion, an increase of 15% over 1998. At the same time, the cost of the customer has driven the cost of $ 80 billion in hardware and service investment. The change in the software industry will have changed this computer industry again.
In addition, the software industry can also become a model of other industries. For example, the "Open Source Association" has set an example of an excellent social organization in other industries. Under this organic form, people may make things more exciting than "code". Just as the information system professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said: "Linux Association provides us with a new economic organization form, which may become the foundation of the next new economy."
("Economist" recently posted a series of articles on future software development trends, please pay attention to our series of reports for friends who are interested in.) (To be continued)
