Yes, I've decided to start my Appistry blog in the same way I've started learning every new programming language I have ever learned in my life, with the obligatory 'Hello World'. We certainly have many more choices today for creating hello world programs then I did back in the 70's on the IBM 360 we had at school. While we did have Basic, Fortran and Cobol, I think the only productive thing we did back then was to generate a much 'yellow punch tape' as we could, when we weren't playing a mainframe version of StarTrek.
While, we have certainly come a long way since the 70's as the pace of technological change seems to increase with every passing year. There have been several phrases coined to describe this accelerating pace of change, but what I find interesting, is the 'tipping point' which seems to drive the change from one technology that is ultimately replaced by something that remedies the ills of it's predecessors. During my tenure at Microsoft I had the fortune of experiencing this first hand, with the introduction of Visual Basic 1.0, Microsoft Access, OS/2, Windows NT, multi-tiered COM+ applications, ASP / web development and ultimately multi-tiered .NET applications. From one development paradigm to the next, each eclipsing and improving the functionality of the previous.
While the pace of technological change increases, have you ever considered how fast a software developers basic needs have been changing? I think the rate of this change can be described in a single word, static. Isn't it interesting that as developers we are looking for the same things today that we needed in the 70's? The needs of most of developers I know have always been around the triad of ility's - scalability, reliability and some form of agility (time-to-market / ease-of-use / lack-of-complexity). With each new development paradigm we learn, we attempt to satisfy that triad of basic needs to build solutions for as long as we can.
While a developers basic needs may not have changed much, the scale and complexity of the solutions being delivered today certainly have changed. So if you consider the main-stream development technology's in use today on the Intel architecture, namely .NET or J2EE do you really feel that those technologies are delivering on that triad of ility's?
It's my personal feeling that the balance between what developers know today and the scale and complexity of the todays business problems seem to be at an uneasy truce. Everything seems possible, but nothing is easy...
What if there was a software product that allowed you to leverage your existing technologies and easily gave them the triad of ility's from above. Thats why I left Microsoft and joined Appistry.
Over the course of time, I hope to show you how the Enterprise Application Fabric changes the paradigm for easily creating scalable and reliable applications. It all starts with a simple fabric based application called, Hello World.
Thanks
Mark
